Continuous development cycle crucial to stream games - Spotify

Daniel Ek, CEO and founder of the music streaming service Spotify, has said that the games industry needs to abandon its long development cycles if it hopes to ever stream games - pointing to World of Warcraft as an example of continuous development.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Ek discussed the potential of a version of the popular music service dedicated to games, as well as how a such a streaming videogames service would work.

"We think that there is a lot of stuff we need to improve in the music area," said Ek. "However, it would be cool to have a Spotify for games."

"[Streaming games] requires that the industry continuously creates content for a game and stops having development cycles that span for years. World of Warcraft is a good example of that type of game."

And when asked if his service, which already includes some videogame soundtracks, planned to secure any more music from games publishers, Ek responded: "Our dream is to have all the world's music, so yes"

Ek further discussed the possibility of adapting Spotify for devices other than the PC and Mac market, such as for home consoles and the iPhone.

"We are looking at lots of different ways that we can integrate Spotify into a lot of the other services and devices out there," he said, adding: "One of our goals is to make Spotify available anywhere. But first we just want to make the PC/Mac experience as good as possible."

"I can't comment on the specifics, but we are excited about new platforms such as the iPhone as it enables third-party developers such as ourselves to develop interesting functionality."

He concluded: "It's good for the mobile industry in general if it becomes more open and we see people use mobile services a lot more. This is something that we are keen to explore."

The UK and Stockholm based company, founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, offers users the ability to stream music on demand using Spotify's software.

Currently in beta, Spotify is available as a premium monthly subscription service, costing GBP 9.99 a month, or a free ad-supported version. Future iterations are set to feature a link with each song leading to an online store where the singles or albums can be bought from.

The software currently has minimum integration with that of Last.fm, which instead of providing exact matches for user searches builds a playlist based around similar artists and genres. Users of both sites can use the scrobble software to display what they're listening to through Spotify on their Last.fm account - further refining the generated playlist.