ICO Partners' Thomas Bidaux

I think that physical distribution will always exist. It's just going to become marginal. It's going to become a marketing exercise, it's going to be collector's editions, something for collectors to have physical objects and everything's going to continue to move digital.

The other thing that's going to happen in my opinion is the distinction between console and PC is going to be blurred with social games and iPhone games. Everything's going to merge in some way and become something so games will be connected. How long it's going to take, I don't know. It might be a long process because we all need to learn how to develop different things. Whether you are a physical developer and you need to understand other aspects of your work, you know, real time games, things like that. If you are a real time game developer and you don't know anything about social gaming you need to understand how different platforms work. The learning curve is steep for everybody, but it's going to happen eventually.

Yes, everybody needs to learn new disciplines, new ways to develop games, and it's going to be a real challenge. It's going outside of your comfort zone.

It is overcrowded. Not in all of the markets, but in general it is. That's the nature of investment. People see something growing and they invest a lot in it and some will crash and burn and some will do very very well. Social gaming has been doing very well but some companies will not be able to succeed in that environment. It's true for every sub section. It's not going to change the growth, but it's going to be a challenge to be the ones surviving the very competitive environment that's being built at the moment.

Online is so much about making your game evolve -you launch the game and it's just the beginning, you've got to keep it working. I tend to find that online game developers have a bit more of a flexible mindset than offline developers - they are more ready to experiment, they are prepared to go somewhere they are not used to because their game is an ever changing product. So in that respect I think they are easy to work with compared to people who have only done offline games.

But people tend to underestimate the value that is built into the traditional offline game - the story, the high quality of the production some games have, visually, all these kinds of things. They think it's not important. And it's probably not at the moment, but it will be important soon to actually learn from the more traditional gaming industry. I have examples of developers who were developing games as they were going and making very unbalanced design decisions. And that was very tricky to get them to go the other way and actually hire professional game designers, crunch numbers and extend balance. It didn't make the games unsuccessful, but it makes them more difficult to maintain.

There's a definite cultural gap between what a good game is for European players and a good game for Asian players. But because there have been success examples in Europe, they tend to be willing to learn. I'd say it's more difficult to make that point with American developers than with Asian ones. Because with America, they really feel that American and European players are the same, which is not true. Whereas Asian companies, even if they already have an American presence, they understand the specific needs for the European market - they know they can't translate directly from what they've done in the US. In some ways, when we work with foreign companies, it's surprisingly simpler with Asian companies because they have a mindset that is suitable for learning what they need to do.

I wasn't expecting server based gaming to be along so early. Gaikai and OnLive - I was looking for them to happen but I was not expecting to see them being announced and being ready to present to the market so early. I would have said it would have taken two or three more years for them to reach that level.

The other surprise was the iPhone - because the iPhone was able to cheat within the mobile context. They were able to actually twist the arms of the carriers and make them change the rules of how customers were interacting with applications on phones and that was a good surprise. Especially now, it gives everybody else, not just Apple, but other devices too ammunition to do the same thing and it's made game business on phones a lot more possible. Now it's happening on iPhones, it may happen on other devices as well thanks to Apple.