Digital Watch

We try! Again because it's changing...

Free-to-play for example! I worked for Blizzard, and five years ago who would have said that free-to-play would crash all the subscriptions? That free-to-play would be everywhere? It changed so quickly, and I remember at that time everyone said it was a Korean thing, an Asian thing, that Western countries don't understand this type of business model, it's too complex.

So this something else that's interesting about online, you can test a lot of things even on free-to-play, you can have the rental model, the permanent model, and you can change on a daily basis, which is not the case for the boxed product.

And that's why also the community has a lot of strength in the online community and free-to-play, is that they can say where they want the game to go, and it's not only the studio that has the vision. So it requires a lot of human resources also, and this is something that has to be taken into account. Because it's a service. Even in production, you have to keep people on the project for the next update, which maybe is not the mindset of the majority of the current studios around the world, where it's like "we've finished the product, that's it, now we're jumping on another one." Here the follow up is really important.

I think so. Because if you cut the team there's no update, people will be bored, and they will quit your game. So you have to propose fresh things. Because on free-to-play you can play for free, but you can leave for free. You have not this feeling when you buy a boxed game or have a subscription, that you have to play because I paid for it. I have to say I didn't waste my money! And there's plenty of competition.

This is also the tricky thing about free-to-play, because you say come and try, and if it's good you stay but if it's not you can leave. It's a different mindset.

We are ramping up our strategy, so the goal is to have this companion gaming concept for our lead brands on the different platforms. Different experiences and interaction between each other. You'll see that on Ghost Recon, we'll have Online, Shadow on iPhone and iPad, and you will have a Facebook game. It will be the first reality of this strategy at the beginning of the year, and we will roll that out for the other franchises.

For the other titles it's really to grow more on PSN and XBLA, with new concepts, and also to take risks on these platforms. And to expand on the mobile platform, now we have eight iOS titles. And the success we have now, with things like Settlers Online, we will be able to apply it to iOS titles. Right now [with] free-to-play, what is successful on one platform can be applied to another. And as you saw we bought RedLynx.

So our goal is really to focus on digital because if you look at our last three major acquisitions it was Owlient, Nadeo and now RedLynx, and even Massive before was known for all the multiplayer and online, so you can see that the strategy is clearly on these platforms.

And the goal is also to have engines that can be platform agnostic, and RedLynx is really successfully on XBLA but also on iOS, so this is also a goal - to have a studio that can jump from platform to another, and not specialise any studio in one platform. It's really that everybody is able to do anything. So this is a big change in production, and maybe it will need some years to be concrete, but right now the digital ambition and everything we talked about in the last two years is now concrete with our titles, and it will go on.

We have to be realistic also, we have to assess things, not everything will work, and on Facebook also we have some things to learn. We had success with the Smurfs, and what we learned there we will apply to our next game.