Life After Sony

There are three key areas I think. On the one hand, yes, there's the product development side of things - you have to get the product right. And also the idea that it's not just a product, it's an ongoing service. And then there's the financial side. And the third part of it is growing the user base.

On the product development side, and the financial side, that's quite mainstream and on the PD side you know what to do, on the financial side the challenge there for a young development team is getting access to funding, meeting the right people, making sure you're not making any daft mistakes like minimising your equity dilution, having realistic revenue projections. And it's easier to raise funds in the US, there's no doubt about that, but there are sources of finance in the UK, absolutely.

Other things that make sense - it's always good to have a demo to present rather than just an idea. So that implies getting access to some sort of angel finance, even if it's you and the team's credit card. If you go and get finance too early then you'll end up giving away too much of your equity, so it's always good to try and get as far as you can before going down the VC route.

Having said all that, this is nothing new particularly - in my case it's just a question of trying to be the person who can hook these small teams up to the people who have access to finance. But then there's the third part, which is growing the user base, which - in the traditional games industry mindset - that's really not something that games development people have been involved with at all because traditionally games developers have essentially outsourced their distribution to the publishers. That's been the relationship - the publishers grow the user base and market the product. But when you're talking about a purely digitally distributed product and a social product then it's all about having the focus on growing the user base for the first time.

It's led me to reflect on my life before Sony, because immediately before Sony I worked for what was then called NTL Interactive running the content side of their interactive TV service, what is now Virgin Media. And I was the only person there with a games background - everybody else came from a web background. I couldn't help but notice that there are two distinct almost digital media tribes. There's the web people and the games people. It always felt like they were working on tantalisingly close parallel lines which never converge and they kind of have different mindsets. A lot of the successful developers in this casual games space and social games space come from a web background rather than a games background. And it's interesting - this is all linked into that focus on growing the user base. I think that traditionally people from a web background are much more focused on grabbing eyeballs - that's what they would do on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis. It's about getting people's attention rather than, say, telling a story. It's about how to distribute their content and growing their audience and that's not something that a traditional games developer has been focused on, which is a more long-form kind of thing.

There was another thing I came across when we were doing the very first EyeToy: Play. The instinct of a traditional games designer is to bring in levels - to devise content gateways. You can't get access to content until you've completed a level. A few years ago it was the case that a very large percentage of the content that you'd painstakingly made is never seen by 80 per cent of the audience because they'd never get to it. And that was one of things that we did on EyeToy: Play - we thought, wow, why are we stopping people accessing these games? We learnt that quite early on.

But that's instinctively how someone from a web background will approach an issue. They're much more upfront and have an open attitude to access to content whereas instinctively people from a games background might think 'well, you have to beat the boss on that level to get to the next level' and that sort of thing. These are, in some ways, caricatures but it is quite interesting to see and experience the different attitudes. In this time now, with these causal and social games, it's apparent to me that the ones that are being most successful are the ones that, first of all, recognise the importance of feedback from their user base and know how to respond in a timely fashion and welcome it and grow their user base and look to the distribution of their content.

It's not rocket science, and the people from a traditional games background will, and indeed are, changing their mindsets.

Yes, it's just me as an individual. As you do, I've met people and am approached by them just because I've been in the industry for some time. It's a very interesting and rewarding way to be involved. And also I felt like, coming from that very particular environment - working for a console manufacturer and having that focus - that I really wanted to spread my wings a bit across the new, emerging trends that were happening across the industry. I've been lucky enough to be able to do that.