Hello Games' Sean Murray

I think the reasons we said that... When I look at different platforms, at digital download in general, it's a really difficult market to be in. Microsoft talk a lot about their XBLA and their products on XBLA, but when they do they only really talk about five games, and those are the top five games. No one really remembers the 110 games that get released a year that don't do that well.

So, we were very wary of that situation when it was our very first game, it was a scary proposition for us. I don't think that Microsoft are driving away innovation, but when I look at the catalogue on XBLA and I look at the catalogue on PSN - I think there's a lot of very interesting titles on PSN. There's a lot of really appealing and different ideas, and I think that's just through the level of 'hands off' that Sony allow, certainly from what we've experienced, that just allows developers to make what they want to make.

That's just because PSN is the only place you can really self-publish a game. The only route on XBLA is through Microsoft as a first-party, or through another publisher. So you always have a publisher. On PSN we're the publisher, so we're totally in control of everything.

I'm a big supporter of developers, so, I think that having developers in control of their own games is always going to lead to higher quality games. I could be completely wrong there. [Laughs]

The thing that I see is that we're approaching, strange though this sounds, the end of this console cycle. I think in the next three years we're going to see the end of this console cycle and the beginning of a new one. I think whenever that happens the last few years are filled with a lot of licenses, sequel etc.

I'm really excited that there are these new ways to create games, like digital download, XBLA, PSN. A lot of the stuff on Steam is way more interesting to me than a raft of new sequels at next year's E3 for example. I'm a lot more excited for that stuff, and I think a lot of people are.

You see the way that Minecraft, for instance, is on fire at the moment, you know? People want innovation, it's just that at this stage, publishers don't want risk - and that's what they're saying. I think that's really short sighted, to me, but then I'm a small developer. I think it would be really risky not to innovate at the moment.

I think that what I hinted at before, about there being an awful lot of titles on XBLA, and there being a really variable level quality on there, I'm really looking forward to the next year on PSN. Personally, for titles that are coming out, there are a lot of titles that haven't been announced yet that are some of the titles that I'm most excited about.

I think it will be interesting to see what does well over the next year.

I'm not just saying this, because we've made a download game, but surely everyone must think, boxed titles are not going to be the way of the future, and high-street stores are not going to be the way of the future. We've already seen it happening with music, with DVDs. You would think games should be at the cutting edge of that, but they're not - they're following slowly behind.

But in regard to a massive, triple-A high budget game, if that's what you mean, I think we're going to make very high quality titles. Very innovative and risky titles that grab attention in that way, that are games we don't have to advertise so much because people want them - that's what's worked for us with Joe Danger and that's what we'll continue to do in future and that allows us to do one thing, which we've always been very excited about, and that's to be involved with the development of our game ourselves.

For Joe Danger, I was one quarter of the whole of that development process. One quarter of Joe Danger is me. I would hate to give that up and go back to being one hundredth of whatever we do next. That makes me shiver, just the thought of that.

We just put up one little ad on our site and we've had a ridiculous number of CVs. It's been a bit scary, because there's no-one at Hello Games to deal with that. We've had hundreds and hundreds actually - I would say well over a thousand CVs over the last six weeks or so.

Which is more than I would have gotten when I was at EA, when I was trying to hire someone and we had agencies and headhunters and so on. I think that really shows that people are really interested in that smaller development team and cycle.

We're desperately trying to find the right people, because I guess if you're four people, you better make sure that whoever you hire you really get on with well. We're found some really good people so far who are hopefully going to join us in the near future. We've moved into a new office to accommodate that because where we were with another person oxygen would have been a problem.

We're kind of in the midst of that expansion, that doubling of the team to 8 people.