Establishing a Perimeter

Just a few years ago I got into a shouting match at Develop in Brighton - there was a panel by the UKIE and TIGA guys, and the whole thing was an anti-Canada statement, how they had to have tax-breaks. I forget who it was, but someone was saying - "we kind of know we're never going to win this fight, but on principle we have to fight the fight. We have to keep ramming against the wall. It may never fall, and we think it may never fall, but we're going to carry on anyway."

I kind of got mad at that. I mean, why? That's just one thing that you can do. There's a hundred other things you can do to support, catalyse, foster, grow, evolve - go do those other things! Then if the government shows up tomorrow and hands you bags of money, then you take the money!

So they said what kind of things, and I explained, well this and that, and they sort of almost said - "well, that sounds like really hard work!" [laughs] No kidding!

This is going back about three years. I was saying, well there's all these digital distribution channels that are emerging. Online, mobile, the iPhone was just emerging - explore that, work with development studios to exploit this new paradigm. They were like, well it's hard work to convince people.

You have a better chance of engaging and educating your membership about the changing dynamics of the game economy than you do running against a wall of politicians. I got nothing against those guys, but I offered to help them out and I think they were just too proud to engage me.

Recently, I think in the last few months, TIGA announced some digital distribution training seminar. Great - but they should have done that three years ago. Had they done that three years ago, again, pure speculation, imagine they'd been talking to the UK studios and entrepreneurs and start-ups then. If they'd got started on these platforms three years ago? To me, that would have had much more impact than if they had won tax breaks.

It's a complex system, and it's hard to predict what one change would have on that system, but it's really not about tax breaks, it's about so much other stuff.

Well, it's the form of studio which suits well the kind of games that are succeeding in these new areas, right? I mean, you don't need 100 people to make an iPhone game or a Facebook game. Naturally, you, me and another buddy of ours could get together and say, hey - we just got fired from Black Rock, we all like working together, what should we do? You have some runway so you get together and you make an iPhone game. You don't say, let's get fifty guys and make the next Halo, you don't have the resources.

I think it's fairly organic and natural in that sense. What's different today to the Britsoft days is that you really have to incorporate the business side. You're the designer, I'm the coder, she's the artist and the fourth person is someone on the business side. Because we can't just put our game in a ziploc bag and take it down to the corner store and put it on the shelf like some of the Brabens of the world did back in the day. You really have to master the sort of business, the marketing, the monetisation, all that stuff. That's the new paradigm of the digital world's games as a service model.

If you're just three blokes who are talented and you code up some stuff and throw it out there, you might get lucky, but your chances are really rough. Barriers to entry are so low that the market is flooded - how do you get noticed and how do you succeed in that sort of flooded market? It's rich with opportunity, but it's also rich with hazard. If you don't have the business skills, you're going to suffer.

My sense is that the UK is super-talented from a development point of view, perhaps less so from a business point of view. If we're just using cultural stereotypes, then the capitalistic Americans, even the nerdiest of programmers still have that business sense to them. There's just more of those businessy people to go around. [laughs] I'm exaggerating and generalising!

To some extent that techy prowess of the UK is counter-productive, the average developer being so talented from a design and production perspective, there's a natural distrust or disconnect for the business side. The feeling that they're so talented that they don't need that. "We're just going to create this awesome thing and it's going to be great and we won't need that." It just doesn't work that way anymore.

If I was TIGA or UKIE, or the government, anyone trying to support the industry, I would focus on those sort of things. I would focus on educating the programmers or the dev folks on the business. Doing events where they can connect with businessy oriented people. That kind of connection would probably have much more impact than all the time wasted on trying to get a tax break. But that's fuzzy, that's hard. You need feet on the ground, you have to shake hands, pull people together. It's much harder than writing statements to lobby government.