UK development: Where next?

Well, we can't be absolute in the way that we talk to people. I think there's going to be boxed for a long time, I think there's going to be console for a long time. My speciality is online games, but I think that's a definition which is getting broader and broader.

A few years ago we just did MMO. Now we're doing MMO, free-to-play, browser games, social games, iPhone games... That definition is getting more blurry, more wide in its scope. So it's exciting times for us. It's also getting a bit more complicated because of all the new platforms.

I think free-to-play is an extremely powerful model, I think online is a very powerful platform, it think that there's lots of things to be done online but there's also so many things to do. You need to have a good plan because just making your game free-to-play isn't going to make it successful. You can have the best game in the world that might not be a good free-to-play game. Equally you can have a very bad game that might not make more money as a free-to-play, but less money.

The whole principle of free-to-play games is that people can try it first, if it sucks, then they don't spend. With pay-to-play at least you can scam people into buying the box without them realising it. I wouldn't recommend it but it's been happening!

I think that online's definitely where the opportunity is at the moment. I'm not saying that you should go and do social games - actually I think that online is wide enough, and sometimes clever enough, to not go where everybody is at the same time. I think there's a bubble coming on Facebook games that's going to be painful, especially in the US, but our remit is wide enough to explore a lot of potentially profitable things.

I think it's going to be the main part of the growth of the game industry in the future, online.

I like the fact that being able to play games in your browser and on your phone appears to have enabled a much larger audience. I'm sure that most people didn't buy their PC to play Farmville, and that most people didn't buy iPhones to play Angry Birds. But now they have them, we have a wider market.

I think there's a bubble coming on Facebook games that's going to be painful, especially in the US

Thomas Bidaux, ICO Partners

So should we be sore that there's a wider proliferation of platforms to be working on? Well, no, because with that came a whole new section of people to be making games for. I don't see that as a negative. Obviously that has an impact on the way we think about creating games... I don't think it's going to settle on the PC because in my house, like many others, I play some games there and there's a different kind of game that gets played in the living room on my television, so I don't think it'll end up completely 100 per cent there.

I think it's definitely made things more challenging. Ten years ago when Black Rock was Climax Racing, one of our big things back then was focus. That was partly genre but also the platforms we were going to support. Now as a start-up, speaking obviously from the very front line, I don't think you can afford to say, this is exactly what we're going to focus on in terms of any platform, unless you've already got something up and running, ready to go.

The flipside is that there are things like Unity and Unreal which means that, for our team's approach, that minimises the challenge. I think that the general level of talent in the UK is a lot higher now than it was ten years ago. The general bar has been raised so people can learn a lot of new platforms, but it does add a challenge in terms of focus though, definitely.

I think the hardest challenge really with the variety of platforms is really sort of what I think David was saying earlier: it's about the audience. Obviously some platforms attract a very different audience to another, whereas some obviously have a lot more of a crossover.

I know some people are saying browser, there's a growing support for tablets as the next big platform. You can already plug your iPad into your television and play Real Racing HD through HDMI and then take it away and play it on the move - that kind of thing is going to grow and grow. Is it the iPad that's going to be that platform? Who knows? I don't think anyone truly knows, that's why it's quite exciting, and scary, to see how it all pans out over the next few years.

The thing with more platforms is, the bigger the market, the bigger the industry. So those are positive things. Once you're in the position to choose a platform then this is where the chance comes. How do you pick? Are you picking up 3DS? Everyone's talking about connected TVs at the moment, or cloud gaming. They've seen Facebook, they've seen iOS and they're thinking maybe it's the next big thing.

So they jump on it, but maybe it will die, for whatever reason. More opportunity, more risk. I think it's good. It means more dynamism, it changes people's positioning for what they're doing, more opportunity overall is a good thing for the industry as a whole - for individual studios things are changing.