Playfish's Kristian Segerstrale

I actually think that the financing environment in London has evolved in leaps and bounds in the past five years. I remember when I built up my previous company Macrospace there, in 2003-04 we were looking at funding options and the marketplace in Europe was pretty tough. But if you look at VCs like Index Ventures and Accel Partners that we worked with – they're both global, world class VCs who are willing to bet big if they like the theme and the approach.

The financing is there if you build not just a good product but actually be a scalable company with a credible management team.

I think the valuation hype has been recently there on virtual goods companies, it is a bubble there's no question about that. Like any industry, it's complicated but for example there's initial success, rapid growth followed by hubris in terms of investment cases and whatnot, followed by a very successful good business environment but one which evolved with the natural part of the games industry.

I think people look at something like social games, and they've been looking at it for the past year and thinking this is something entirely new, entirely different which will defy gravity and be a different kind of game environment. This year I think will show them that this will be the natural extension of the games market where a couple of things matter – scale matters, access to franchises matters. The overall gaming market becoming multi-platform means that you have to have multi-platform capability in order to really be able to reach the kind of scale you need to reach in the market.

I think that in the past year there's been this sort of misconception that social gaming is something entirely different and new and will follow completely different rules to the rest of the games industry. I think you'll actually see this year that the kind of thinking around the industry will be much more how it fits into the broader games industry and does similar things to the broader games industry like access to franchises, like multi-platform publishing muscle and marketing spend will all be important.

Yes, I think so. I think we'll see a sort of consolidation and some companies will make it and others won't. The social games market has grown up incredibly quickly and it's very competitive and it is and will be driven by some of the same success factors as the rest of the gaming industry.

So I think one, you will start to see a lot more mass market entertainment franchises make their way to the social networks. I think the other place there will be innovation is in the gameplay mechanics that we create and more true, if you like, social interactions through games. I think we're still only scratching the surface in how we let people interact through social networks and through gameplay. How they play together, I think there's some innovation left there.

And I think more than anything there will be inspirational new designs. Right now I don't think the farm category will live on forever. It's been a break-out success with a hugely successful game in that category. I think it's pretty obvious that there will now be other big important categories in social games and I think this year we'll see some of the up and coming companies cover some of those. Generally I think you will see this moving incredibly quickly, which is another of the fascinating things about the social games space today, which I think is indicative of where the rest of the game industry is heading. You actually have this evolution through generations if you like where, previously it used to be that you'd take a franchise like FIFA for example, you'd release a game, say, every year, in some cases two games a year if it's a major footballing event, then you have its cheap rival that had also evolved once a year.

Whereas in social games and generally games that are served on demand as a service, these games evolve every week so when two games in the same category compete they literally both evolve every week and react to each other's innovations and you have to innovate and react to everything else that's happening in the marketplace, launch new features and try to do everything you can to lead in that category. I think that videogames will see very fast iteration and rapid evolution in each category.

Well, our ambition has ultimately always been, as you say, to change how the world plays games and I think we are still at the beginning of this shift from gaming being physical products to a digital service. And it's happening everywhere – it's happening across console, it's happening across mobile, it's happening across any type of game you can think of even though what we today call social games are sort of at the cutting edge of where that might be heading in terms of some of the lessons we learn that will apply to other platforms. I guess what we're really excited about being part of EA now is being part of this broader mass of change in the game industry. Not just with what's happening on social networks but what's happening across all the different platforms and being part of an organisation that's socially committed to leading that change, not just on social networks but also on iPhone it's super exciting and is what I think is really changing how the world plays games.