Preloaded's Phil Stuart

Our business has been built on some really strong relationships with the major players - again, Science Museum, Channel 4 - but we’re talking to brand agencies, advertising agencies and brands themselves about games, and actually there’s been such positivity around games. The whole gamification thing is something we’ve tried to stay away from a little bit, because it kind of oversimplifies what we’re trying to do, but there’s a lot of smart in some key agencies that we’re talking to. The real potential, and I think this kind of transcends brands and institutions and educators, is trying to make these kinds of bodies more like a publisher. So they self-publish titles, take their content to their audience. We’re trying to make them see themselves more as a publisher of content than a commissioner of it. That can work for brands and educators, and we feel like we’ve done it pretty successful on Channel 4 Education, and we’re working with another couple of clients trying to do the same thing.

The idea of being able to engage an immediate audience directly through games portals or via iTunes or Xbox is a really exciting thing for them, because it used to be just a few triple-A game studios - but now they can come to us and say ‘we want reach this audience around this piece of science’ and we can reach them through loads of different channels. The advent of really decent platform agnostic tech like Unity makes it so much easier. That’s the future of our business really - looking at how we work across different platforms using some really decent agnostic tech. We’re looking at HTML5 as well, but trying to use that to target a much broader audience.

For us, as a sort of casual social games studio we see the future of casual games as being multiplatform. There’s no point building casual games on one platform, it needs to be on all platforms. That’s the essence. The games are so simple, the reason casual games have been legitimised over the last couple of years is they exist on social platforms and mobile platforms and they’re essentially self-publishing. The opening up of it has allowed it to get everywhere, and that’s why it’s much more mainstream and much more accepted.

It’s an interesting one, isn’t it, because we’ve been going for 11 years and there’s only 15 people here. We’ve got big plans this year and next year, but the focus is building quality products. Our portfolio is really strong and we’re proud of our products, and the reason for that is we think we’re making really good quality work. We’ve got one social game in production for Channel 4 at the minute and another for another broadcaster, which is a little bit secret, but there is such potential now in social games. They’re moving into almost a new stage, internally we talk about it as Social Games 2.0, where people are trying to put the fun into those games. So many people now kind of accept microtransactions in their games - people are downloading freemium games, it’s become convention, people understand that there will be monetisation in games. But now social games have to try and add more fun, less cynical mechanics and what we’re doing is trying to demonstrate what our take on social games is. It’s not just about compulsion loops, but general engagement.

So to answer you directly, we’re probably not going to make a social game about cheddar cheese, but it probably isn’t going to work. We’ve got to really believe what we’re doing, and one of things with being a studio for who 70 per cent of our work is from commissions, is that we’ve really got to love what we’re doing. You only three or four commissions that aren’t good to end up changing what people think your business is. We pitch the ideas we want to make, we control what we make and who they’re for, and to be honest we have to trust the autonomy to deliver the best product for our client. Our clients that we’ve worked with for years really trust our opinion, so we’re making what we think is right for them but also what we want to make as well.

Well, over the last year we’ve been developing our own IPs and components, and I think we see very much the future of our business doing much more self-funded stuff. The games market is so buoyant - there are definitely areas we’re beginning to expand into, and we’re going outside the UK. We think games and education is such a powerful combination, so we’re looking at educators outside the UK as well. We do a lot of work for C4 Education, but there are a lot of briefs that we don’t pick up and don’t take, so I don’t think we feel concerned at all about the market at the minute. We’ve never felt more confident, really.

I look at game studios, and a lot of the more traditional ones supplement their own work with outsourced work and production work. What we’ve got at the minute is a fantastic selection of clients and briefs that allow us to do really great work, as well as supplementing that with our own stuff. We’re not about to start competing with traditional game studios, but we are very much trying to establish ourselves as a credible player in the games industry.

Yeah, giving control to Apple isn’t what we’re looking to do. The future for us is multiplatform. With things like Unity and HTML5, we’re now in a place where as a small studio we can begin to be multiplatform. I look at someone like PopCap, who we respect so much, and they’re targeting different platforms with core IPs. It’s a bit of an ambition of ours really - once we’ve built more of our own stuff we’re going to be targeting as many platforms as possible.