Getting It Now

There are lots of methods - first of all there's online advertising, and you can just advertise the link. You could also embed it in a press release if you wanted to - the way our technology works it's truly a web application, but at the same time it's also a fully-native application. It's kind of what Google wants to get to with native applications.

What that means is that you have the ability to have links into the social networks - I can actually send you an invite to the game, then you click on it and we do it that way. But just about any way you can imagine, you can share it - so it's a little different than just being able to go to a site, because the game can show up in people's blogs, and so on.

Now, I don't want to diminish the marketing and PR efforts, because that's one of the nice things about InstantAction as a whole system - it was designed to be a whole destination portal, so all of the functionality of a portal is at your command. You can sell advertising and things like that, you can do your marketing and PR...

So although we want this system to be usable by huge publishers, we don't discount the value of publishers - in fact we embrace it, because they know how to name and fund products, they know how to guide development, to market and PR. Developers may think they know how to do that, but the reality is that the publishers are very good at it.

We license our platform to the publishers so that they can publish on it - and we would license to an independent developer as well, but they're going to find out pretty soon that they really like publishers, just for different reasons.

They think they like the publisher because of the distribution, but actually that's not why you want a publisher - you want them because they know what they are doing.

I hope so. I have no love at all for the Wal-Marts and GameStops of the world - they've abused the industry horribly with selling used games, and rentals. There's no love lost there at all. They're all desperately trying to figure out where to go next too, but at the end of the day they've killed the distribution method.

They've put our entire industry in jeopardy by taking all of the money out of the system - between them and the pirates it's really a tough way to go. We didn't design this system to defeat piracy - it wasn't why we built it - it just so happens that because of the way we deliver it, it makes it extremely difficult to steal... but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

We're not going to pretend anybody can stop a pirate, but we've made it really, really hard by accident.

Absolutely - so many of the pirates would tell you that one of the big reasons they do it is because they feel like going out and paying £50 for a game just to see if they like it or not seems unreasonable.

So now I tell them it's better than that - we'll give it to you for free, so you can see and try the products before you buy them. Don't make it difficult for us - help us change the industry.

Oh, I'm not going to put the pennies on the eyes of traditional retail - those guys are going to be around for a long time, and it's going to take a while. We're not going to be the only technology out there, but every one of them will be another brick in the wall, another step in the right direction to saving our industry from partners that became parasites. They're really no longer partners - they're killing the goose that lays the golden egg.