Lighting Up

We've started off on PC because it's the most accessible platform when you're developing, trialling and testing things out, and creating your own ideas. That's gone very well, and we know that the PC gamer is, if you like, our classic customer - somebody who plays an online game, for example, for hours and hours, and is constantly coming back to the same game. That's a fantastic opportunity for us to then expand their whole experience in the game they're so committed to.

So very important for us on PC - but how do we move on to the more mainstream console? Well, we are already - we're licensed for PlayStation, and we've embarked on that process with Xbox. It's all with view to having - hopefully - consumer products moving into the market at the end of 2010, early 2011, that are amBX, and enhance the whole console experience.

It's not just for games - we enhance the movie experience, download content, streamed content, and we'll deliver amBX effectively across all of that because we've got a scripted experience model and an automated model - and both work very, very well.

So anybody buying amBX equipment, it's not just going to work on this game or that game, it'll work on all their games to a certain degree, and all their movies and any other content they're using as well.

We're getting very good buy-in, actually, because one of the first things we did when we came out of Philips was to produce an amBX development kit, which we give away for free. We put a lot of time and effort in making it the best possible toolset we could provide to develop this.

So much so, that another industry heavyweight, Immersion Inc [the company behind rumble technology], has actually approached us and we're now working on a joint development kit with them, which also uses Immersion effects - so again, it's a commitment to making this easier and better for the industry to adopt so that developers and publishers see a real benefit from it.

That's what we're hoping to be able to deliver - that's our ambition - to make it so easy and give them such a good set of tools that they see it's the way to go.

And also the games publishers have one question: "When are you going to have console product out there?" We have to bring both of those together at the same time - we know that if the publishers support it we'll get the hardware out there, and if the hardware's out there then the publishers will support it. That's the equation we're putting together right now.

No, Philips has moved away from PC accessories in that way, but we recently announced a licensing deal with Mad Catz to produce some products under the Saitek brand. There are more announcements coming out soon around that - and that's fairly exciting. It's the first of what we hope will be a number of further licensing announcements over the next couple of months.

You can actually buy one of the Philips kits for about GBP 50, and that'll give you a great experience on your PC. There will be a premium for amBX products compared to non-amBX products - we make our money out of licensing, so that license cost is borne by the device manufacturer, but it's free to publishers and developers.

The price points will be determined by our partners, not by us - we're not making the products, so it would be wrong for me to speculate on that. We know that nobody's going to produce a product that's ridiculously out of the ballpark.

You can get a lighting set for your PC, including desktop fans and a rumble strip, for about GBP 59 I think is the current price.