Justin Johnson

In terms of limitations, we think we've got the technical side licked. Playmetrix will be able to process the kind of event data storms that telecommunications software is designed to deal with - which is a hell of a lot data. We're talking upwards of 100,000 events per second that we can handle.

But it's completely applicable for multi-player games and also MMOs. Basically, if you've got a point in a game where you want to know what a player is doing, we can track it.

Absolutely - for that particular use case we support heat maps as well.

The first premise there is that there's got to be an online connection somewhere in the equation, in order to get the data back to Playmetrix HQ. But even where you have a case, with a traditional console game, where somebody's gone out and bought it, they go home and play it - any publisher or developer will want some sort of metric intelligence based on how they're game is doing in the market place.

There's no reason why game data shouldn't be captured at play point and sent back - that'll give publishers and developers all the cues that they need to find out what the most popular areas of the game are, what the most popular weapons are, and basically how the population is engaging with that content. And that would help shape the franchise?

I think we tie it in with the online, digital revolution that's happening now, that's going across industries. It's happening with music, with book titles, and it's basically all about information - and games are a kind of interactive exchange of information.

We can see that, with the advent of things like the app stores, that games are being delivered as a service. They're getting into faster iteration cycles, particularly with digital downloads, and from that point of view - when you run games on that structure - you need to be monitoring what your players are doing, so that you can provide a better service.

The moment you get into any kind of faster iterative service where you need to respond to you customers - your players - you've got to give players what they want... and you've got to find out what they want.

In years gone by it could be pretty hit-and-miss, and you'd have designers that just went on gut instinct. The good ones got it right; but they didn't get it right all of the time - but now you can concentrate on looking at what all of your players want,and work towards providing it for them.

We looked at a number of different charging models, but the one that we've settled on is based on peak concurrent users over a 30-day period. The reason we've settled on that particular metric for charge-out is because anybody who's doing an online game will have a good idea about that metric - because the PCU is what their own game will have to deal with in terms of load.

It's something they'll have readily available at hand - and it also ties into our operational costs, in terms of coping with the amount of data that we need to process, and so on.

Yes - we're at a stage at the moment where we're working with a number of early adopters, and we're looking for key partners to work very closely with - both in terms of integrating metrics into their game at quite a deep level, but also offering our financial analysis to interpret that data, and to make significant and measurable improvements in their product.

That close early adopter programme is going to be going on for the next few months, and we anticipate that towards the middle or end of Q2 we'll be launching it up to the public, as it were, with our fully banded PCU costing rollout.