A Sproing in the Step

That's exactly the thing, about baby steps and over-delivering. That's exactly what we did - we started a company... I had worked in the games industry before, as a freelance programmer, on a pretty big PlayStation game, and when we started our own studio we took a step back and did very small casual games, because we were just four people.

So we did those, shipped them and they were all great. In the beginning people thought of us as a casual games studio and we got all kinds of fun from that... but most of the people that were laughing at that time aren't around now.

We just did it piece by piece - we started with smaller projects, then we did a bigger game, which was the one time we probably scaled a little bit too big, and learned that lesson really quickly. And then we just deliver - and if you do that again and again and again...

It's maybe a little bit hard to communicate that what you're doing today is different to what you did four years ago, because you've obviously evolved, but that has worked well for us and built the reputation.

It's a little bit more difficult for us to hire at times, because people ask what our incredible project is. I think Cursed Mountain will help there, but it's a little bit more difficult to explain. And it's also a different kind of job, because in these big studios what you do is one type of game the whole time, and after a certain amount of time, you're thinking: "Again?"

In our studio it's different, because this year we're doing a Winter Sports compilation for Activision, we just shipped Cursed Mountain - a survival horror game - we're doing an adventure-type game that I can't really say much about, and there's some stuff we haven't yet started which is totally different again.

It's harder to explain both to applicants and publishers what you're core experience is, but our core is that we've invested an incredible amount of resources into our process technology and we've got incredible technology to build games really fast - so that gives us a flexibility that many others just don't have.

That goes down to motivation theory here, but if you actually have a certain amount of change and new challenges in your job, it increases motivation and is more fun to work on different projects. If you have a good team that does the research properly you can get great results. Cursed Mountain is our first survival horror game and the first rating was 8.2 out of 10. Our first tactics game was Console Game of the Year 2008... and we do a children's riding game, and the forums are full of praise.

And as stupid as it sounds, the same technology drives both games, so it's versatile technology. There is a limit to it, of course - you can't do everything, that doesn't make sense.

But the people that work for us are flexible, they're very skilled, they know what they're getting into. When you're in a smaller team and you have less people doing the same kind of product as you have in other teams, then the personal impact you as a team member have on the final result is higher, and that again gives you higher motivation. Which is very rewarding.

Then I guess we're smart about managing that process... we took nine years to build 50 people - other people do that in one or two years.

It's reasonable within Europe. On a global scale it's lower than on the UK - I do find that we end up being more cost-effective than the US studios. So it's not low cost - certainly not - but it's not really extremely expensive either.

In any kind of environment where you have inflationary price increase over time that's the natural way of things. Of course, what we try to do is improve our quality and output that we generate per hour of development, and in terms of the products we deliver.

If the quality is there, it's also okay to ask a higher price for that and ask for a better margin. As a business we're trying to develop better quality and then people will be willing to pay a higher price.