Do not pass GO

It's a horrible position for me to be in. I've got a ton of very talented developers who are very interested in my intellectual property. [Laughs] Now what I've got is the GO initiative so I can turn around to them and say: I've got this incredibly deep catalogue of IP which you can get involved with, and I'll help you develop the next iteration of a classic game. I'll help you to create a socialised, monetised version of a classic piece of IP from any of the studios which were part of Atari during its long lifespan. That's what we're finding is a tremendous opportunity, a lot of developers are getting very excited about that.

You can imagine that they get even more excited when someone like Nolan Bushnell sits in on a call, or sits in on a meeting, to help brainstorm how they're going to do that.

This initiative is not about going out after the market with a big stick, that's a different situation. First and foremost we're going to be saying, let's bring the friends and folks who love us, and the folks who love these brands, into the fold, and we'll worry about the folks who don't want to play along, no pun intended, we'll worry about them later in a different context.

Absolutely. It depends on the type and scale of the game, but one of the things that we're doing with our developers is, if someone's coming in and developing original IP with us, or even building new games on some of our classic IP, what we're doing is setting up a program that pays very handsome royalties, but also incentivises them to really own the game's success, along with us.

The great thing is, because of this infrastructure that we've got, that grew out of the acquisition of Cryptic, and everything we've been able to build on that since then, I'm in a position whereby I can offer a developer frontline customer service, frontline community management, QA services, access to the best localisation services that they may or may not have, best practices on how to set up a game....

A lot of these companies have no idea how to set up a game for localisation, we are a global distributor - we put all those services in the front end, then on the back end, help them understand through a really rich set of metrics and analytics and the same KPIs that work best across a particular game and a particular genre, because a casual browser-based game is going to work very differently from an MMO, right, help with those learnings on month-to-month basis to know how they can optimise the game, the player interaction, the microtransaction spending etc.

There's a challenge, if you're a microstudio developer, to how you balance your own development effort. Am I going to build a metrics driven game or am I going to design a game from the true player centred design that the traditional studios love?

There's all this pressure to follow the Zynga model and really focus on the metrics and analytics, and that works well for many types of games, but it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. If I can take that problem off the plate of a developer or studio and say, we'll worry about that, and help you see the data in a way that makes sense for your game, that let's them focus on what they do best, which is to create great games, and we can focus on the underpinning.

30-50 per cent.

Yes, it's all of it. Because we've had all that come to us already. There are some games listed up on the Atari play site already, listed as coming soon, so you can understand that this is the first of many decisions which we hope to be having over the next few months. We've got a lot of games that are already in this initiative, that have been in development for months and will be coming out soon.

We've got games that range from simple, socialised arcade games, all the way up to light MMOs. In terms of distribution, it's not only out to affiliates and large-scale portals, but some of them may turn into, and there are a couple right now, that will turn into a point where we go back to the studio and say, look: this will make a great XBLA, PSN or PC game. What you really ought to do is think about this angle on it and go to XBLA or PSN.

Retail, well, the retail market is changing so dynamically... I wouldn't want to get any studio all excited about seeing any boxed products sitting on the shelves that were still sitting in the discount bin, or the used game sales, but I think it's an opportunistic thing. If it makes sense to go down that route, and it might, we'll help them go in that direction. But this isn't about filling a retail pipeline. This is about games online.

One of the things it's interesting to think about with regard to the assistance we provide to the developer to help them transit the marketplace as well as the platforms, is that a big part of the initiative and the games you'll see from us in the not too distant future, really falls into this cross-stream gaming model that a lot of us in the industry are really trying to achieve.

Which is, that a game on a browser has a complimentary and additive element to its companion mobile game, or companion PC download, or its companion console title. But it's got to be more than just the sharing of resources, you can't just pull the old franchise game that a lot of large-scale publishers have done in the past, where they simply take a game's title and slap it on a mobile game that somehow sort of reminds the player of the same genre and say that the game is cross-genre - that's simply not true.

Now we live in a world of networked games, where we're able to have that cross-pollination and collaborative play from one platform to the next. I think a lot of studios and publishers have been chasing this, over the last year, it's on a lot more people's minds right now - we've been talking to a lot of studios who have these aspirations. But if you don't have that backend infrastructure, let alone a pile of other studios and developers to work with to build that collaborative or component piece - because no one studio is good at all these platforms - then that's where having the scale of initiative like GO becomes valuable to these guys.