Denis Dyack Part Two

Silicon Knights is going to remain focused on big budget titles. What's happening is we're following the model of the movie industry and I think it's a natural evolution. When the movie industry began there were a lot of studios and a lot of pictures coming out but not a lot of huge hits. Then they all merged into the six studios that we have today. There's still independent film ideas, but the major money makers are through the main studios. All the iPhone stuff, all the mobile phone stuff, though there may be some money there, it's what I would consider indie. Elsewhere, budgets are getting bigger like with Modern Warfare 2 – that's done a good haul at retail. You're going to get fewer of those.

Of course. That's all part of the mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies. You'll get companies that continue to play in that and others that will have to merge to survive or exit completely. It's really going to come down to the bigger players who will continue to play the game and others that are going to withdraw. You're seeing a lot right now of this movement to iPhones and stuff because there's nothing else out there. It's very possible that Silicon Knights could have a success on that format, but it's not our interest, it's not our model.

Yes, that's where we want to be and that's where we want to stay. We've always been big proponents of high production values. We'd rather do fewer bigger titles than several small ones. That's the way we've always been.

When I first talked about a single format future, one of the things I talked about was technology and commoditisation and how the value of the technology will continue to move towards zero. Theoretically consoles could be commoditised to zero and not exist any more. Which is exactly what cloud computing is. In some ways it's the absolute elimination of any hardware as far as the consumer is concerned, because the hardware is the cloud. It helps on so many levels because it resolves the piracy issue, which is a massive problem today, and the used games issue, because you buy something and it's yours forever – it resides on the cloud. These are wins for the consumers and wins for the game developers.

I don't know what the current stats are but if you go two years back I believe there were over 300 games released in November 2007. There's a term in commoditisation that's called performance oversupply. That's when the market starts over performing and giving the consumer more than it can possibly consume. If you have Gears of War which is unique to the Xbox 360 and Uncharted 2 for the PS3, they're not really competing against each other. Depending on which console you have you have an oversupply of games because you can't play them all unless you have all the consoles. The average consumer can't buy all those games. So the idea of a singular console is good because it makes people compete on an even playing field. It's not about who's better at programming the PS3 or the 360 or the Wii. It's a game first and foremost. Forget the hardware, I want to be entertained.

Look at movies and the DVD player is a really good example of an open, competitive field where you can buy any hardware and you know the movie will play. People confuse a one console future as a monopoly and that's completely wrong. The idea is it would be an open standardised format where anyone could manufacture. A counter argument to that is, we're talking about the PC platform, right? But the PC is not standardised. When you go and buy a PC game the first questions you ask is 'will it run on my computer?' That's a marketing campaign, 'this will run on your PC, don't worry'. The real problem is the consumer needs to be confident that when they buy Game X they will be able to play it, period. If a grandmother goes into a store and wants a specific game for her grandson, she has to figure out the console, the ratings system, and all these barriers that have been artificially created. People think that's normal because that's all we've ever had. I know of no instance of any technology that hasn't been commoditised. I'm a big believer in that still. Context is everything and these are complex matters. This is a win for everyone. For consumers and publishers and as a developer I just want to makes the games.