X Marks the Spot

That's absolutely the way it's gone. There are so many more teams. So many are in that mobile space developing for an Apple platform, where you only need software, not tens of thousands of pounds worth of hardware. There are lots of people with great ideas out there and you can realise them with far less outlay. We're getting to see a lot more pitches come in because of that. Now, granted, a lot of those pitches are carbon copies of titles that have done well but every now and again we get something that is standout that you want to invest in. It's great starting point for many. We don't see many of the larger teams coming to us anymore...

Either that or because they've been snaffled up by another publisher. We get more reward seeing a small team grow into a really great one so long as they don't lose the essence of what made them in the first place. That's something we tried to maintain with Media Molecule, they are absolutely the same company they were before we acquired them.

It was around 2010, and Phil Gaskell from Rebel Play introduced me to the guys at Double Eleven and they're so absolutely passionate about what they are doing. They get so much out of each other, they only hire the very, very best people and engineers. That's one of the things we say, usually in development studios there's just one or two stand out guys who you know are going to drag this game from a piece of paper and a Powerpoint presentation to something that's awesome. A lot of them can be tricky to work with. Like David Cage, those people that have that vision that they work through - not that David is tricky to work with.

He's got an opinion and his team following him because they know he will absolutely deliver. And he does.

Absolutely. When we gave them LittleBigPlanet to work with they were all over it, looking at new ways to handle it. That's great to see. You might see teams that want to handle things differently, but Double Eleven wanted to rip the code to pieces, make it fit the hardware and build another game. That's a great position to be in.

It's the mobile space. At Sony we haven't really experimented with freemium play and micro-transactions as some of the mobile development teams have, for obvious reasons. So there's a couple of unannounced internal concepts that we've got where we're looking at that whole area. Coming from console development that was a real eye-opener. The most successful companies in the mobile space define the game once it's launched. They analyse everything in infinite detail with a team of analysts on the game to figure out how it can work. They just don't build things like we do in the console space. I think there will be a trend where we try and understand a lot more of how that market works with our products.

On the PlayStation Network if you compare it to Facebook we obviously don't have those numbers but that's because we haven't had a platform that you can have with you all the time. So I am really expecting to see the PlayStation Network expand and the number of users go up exponentially with the introduction of Vita. It's an interesting space, the amount of costumes that we release for LittleBigPlanet, that taps into that market and gives players things they can build into their worlds. We do see it in those instances and it keeps the community alive, it's definitely an area that you cannot neglect.

They didn't do it trivially, they really thought about how they can manage that. A lot of their findings have been sent out to teams and they've done internal workshops and told us about how that whole process has worked for them. Consoles aren't going to go that way entirely of course. Look at Uncharted 3, I don't ever want that experience to go away, we want to that to grow. The Quantic Dream experiences, the Naughty Dog experiences, we want them to continue.

We know it's tough out there but it always is. If no one's funding your project then it doesn't matter if the economy is doing well or not. There's definitely a lot less presence in the UK from other publishers, so it's harder if people are looking to be published on a console. They have to fly out to the US to meet with the big boys. That makes it very tough for them. But then you do have the mobile space which is another opportunity. We don't really see it because the companies we work with, we fund.

One thing they do say is the labour market is massive because there's that many companies that have gone under there's absolutely no problem attracting people. Developers are able to contract a lot of people that were laid off. So instead of going through a company to outsource, there's 20 engineers you can bring in and they can earn very good money directly from their raw talent on a project. I have nothing but admiration for anybody that sets up on their own, it takes huge balls to do that sort of stuff. We're just far more open to that way of working. At one point a lot of the outsourcing work was going over to China and to Asia, but because there's this workforce a lot closer to home, who speak English as a native tongue, it's very easy to get some of those guys into a studio and working on a project for a year and a half and really grow their portfolio. We've definitely got the talent here. We don't necessarily get those huge teams anymore but you can have a nucleus of 20-30 people and augment that with another 20 or 30 people at a time and they move around from project to project.