Courageous not cowardly development rewards publishers - Levine

2K Boston's Ken Levine has praised publisher Take-Two for its willingness to take risks with new game ideas, pointing out that as well as creating critical and artistic successes, there's a marketing and sales reward to be had too.

Following a record-breaking debut on Xbox Live, Levine's BioShock was released on Xbox 360 and received numerous awards as well as selling well over two million copies, prompting a sequel to go into development for release in 2009.

"There is no way this game could have been made without a sense or risk and that was there in the corporate culture," said Levine speaking at the Develop in Brighton conference.

"For those guys to have the courage to do these games and release GTA IV, that sets up a culture that will support the development of a game like BioShock. [Take-Two] had been through the wars on this and they understood that the artistic integrity was important. I think there's a market benefit of not being cowardly.

"If you got here with something edgy and something cool that's a narrower space that clearly wasn't being exploited. … the audience is ready for it, they're the leading indicator we're the lagging indicator," he said.

On the subject of improving work by accepting feedback during the development process, Levine said that teams need to be aware that focus groups can point out problems with a game, but they can't be expected to fix them.

"The thing about feedback is that you have to be the authors of it, you can change with the wind - but if everything says they hate something, then something is probably there."

"But they can't tell you how to fix it. I've seen that marketing guys have gotten a lot better, but you get very bad data out of that [focus groups]. You have to be open to complaints, but they're not going to solve that problem for you," he said.