Heide and Speak

Well, I don't think Killzone will go away any time soon, it's a big franchise for us and it's important to Sony, so it's not something that we'll put to the side and say, well we'll only do this other thing now.

I think there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of room left to explore in the Killzone universe, but at the same time I think that doing something new, in a different style maybe, perhaps a different type of gameplay is also quite exciting. I think we have to find a good balance. We want to become a two-project studio at some point so we have to figure out how to that.

There's great examples out there. The guys at Insomniac have been doing that trick for a while now where Resistance and Ratchet sort of bounce off each other. So there might be different sort of things that we can learn from those sort of guys.

Not really. We're still very much an independent studio. That's what a lot people thought initially as well, from our end - not just looking at it from the outside. Does becoming part of Sony mean we'll have all of these corporate rules enforced, will there be a change of culture, will we become Sony Amsterdam rather than Guerrilla?

We're not. We're very much Guerrilla. And that's not just because there's a little bit of water between us and the London office. The people we work with at Sony are smart enough to see that, for a studio to do what it does, it needs a certain culture, a certain identity. If you take that away, turn them into something different, you might actually lose the thing that you bought them for.

We want people to trust the name Guerrilla. So we haven't lost that, but at the same time we've gained a lot because, initially if you go to these trade shows and these events, you meet other developers. It's a very small circle. But the conversations you generally have... 'What are you working on?' 'I can't say.' 'What are you working on?' 'I can't say either.' 'Nice talking to you'. That's pretty much it. You're all under NDA it's very difficult to go into specifics.

But because you're part of the Sony family, there's such great first-party studios out there, I can now go up Alex and say, 'what are you guys doing? How this working, how's that working?' We can share all of these things. So in that respect we do get a lot back. We get a lot more insight into what works for them.

Naughty Dog are obviously on top of their game, Santa Monica have done a number of great titles, so we can find out what works for them.

But there's not a lot of things that you can just transplant, because you have your own identity and we're based in Amsterdam, we're not on the East or West coast of the US, we're not in the UK, so we have different sources to pool from.

But at the same time it's good to share those experiences and see what those guys do really well, and what we can learn from them.

It's a much smaller community, but at the same time you do notice a couple of these things. Smaller studios that go under, but the bigger ones stay afloat because most of the bigger ones have already aligned themselves with publishers.

Of course you have to put out quality stuff and make yourself attractive to publishers, but there being less studios means it has less overall impact. I can imagine in the UK it's much bigger news because a lot more people are employed in the games industry, wheras in Holland that's not the case. I don't think it would hit the national news in the same way as it does in the UK or the US.

What we do find, is that because we take on board a lot of people from other studios, because Holland has such a small pool to draw from itself, we have about twenty different nationalities in the building, in a team of 140 people.

It's about half and half, with half being Dutch and half being international, we draw from everywhere. So if studios in the UK struggle we sort of say, is there anyone here we can use? We're still recruiting, we're still very much growing, there are still opportunities for those people to come on board with Guerrilla.