Do not pass GO

No, being part of GO affords you the insight into the data about your game, about the performance of your game across the entire network. Likewise on the other side of the equation, being a distributor or an affiliate, affords you access to a dashboard which shows you how the games you're currently running are working and monetising. That monetisation of course is not only what happens within any one individual game, there's a unified Atari currency, called Atari Tokens, which users will be able to apply to a lot of these games - although the games running on Facebook are certainly going to be using Facebook credits others are not, so above and beyond that we'll have a meta-currency which people can use across all Atari games which we're distributing as part of GO.

You'll be able to buy tokens at the Atari play site, but you'll also be able to buy pre-paid cards at retail, in almost all cases we're striving in nearly every game we field to be able to buy tokens in-situ in the game, even if it's appearing on an affiliate website. You should be able to purchase the token you need without leaving that website.

To touch back to marketing, before I go back into technology, it's important to understand when you're dealing with the sheer scale of services which we can bring to bear for a studio or publisher...

I can identify that you're playing this new, socialised version of Asteroids, you're playing a lot, doing a lot of activity and playing at these levels - I can identify, through the analytics, that you're probably the sort of person who's going to be interested in Star Trek. So I can cross-promote you into Star Trek, or I can cross promote you into another similar genre of game within the family of games which we've got to bring to the online audience.

Another thing is our brand partners. We've had great success in the past on the retail side, with doing brand partnerships with retail chains, fast food outlets etc - integrating their promotions with our games. That's something that you're not going to see a lot of other folks trying to bring into the online game space - bringing those sorts of partners to help monetise a game and bring money to a studio or developer.

I love the fact that you've already characterised it as the first 12 months, because that's absolutely right. In the initial months you're going to see probably about three quarters of the titles being socialised, re-imagined versions of classic IP - that will absolutely shift as we go into year two and year three and year four.

Well, I think you've characterised it perfectly: that was just an announcement. David and I spent a lot of time in 2009 talking about how I might be able to help Atari in this area - Nolan and I were off on our venture, then it got integrated back into Atari earlier this year.

The difference now is that you can actually go and see these games. You can go and play these games on Facebook, you can do that right now. We've got games that are going live now week by week. We've got an API and a platform of services and a network operation centre that you can start writing your code to today. We've got ways to monetise your games today. This is real, this is happening - this isn't something we're planning on doing sometime in the future.

We'll always be creative, absolutely. But think about the role of a publisher, in this era, the nature of what it is to be a publisher has fundamentally changed. Of course we'll continue to be creative and create our own products, but the landscape is shifting so quickly, and the nature on online play is moving so fast, that you're never going to have a large global organisation like Atari be as nimble as the independents. So really, we're looking at how to create the best partnerships between these two sides of the industry.