Preview: DICE Summit 2010

It really reminds me of the way that children and young adults, as we play and socialise it's always with your core group of friends - on a given Saturday afternoon, you may go hit a park. Somebody brings a ball, and the next thing you know there's a footie match happening and beers to follow.

I think that Facebook has aggregated all of us and our social networks - all of a sudden it fills that void of 'now that we're all together, what do we do?' I'm not sure where the glue ends and where the building blocks start in terms of what's more important to the Facebook experience.

That was one of the things I was looking for. Steve Perlman and I started talking a few years ago, in the early days when OnLive was unnamed. I'd met him many years before when he was at WebTV - he's an incredibly smart guy with a number of patents to his name around video codecs on the web.

The OnLive proposition so fits what I think most Western consumers are used to in other entertainment and digital services - which is on-demand. Charge me a fair, flat price and don't make me think about anything else.

It'll be interesting whether OnLive will be judged as important and successful as the launch expands, relative to the premise. But I thought one of the most interesting things was the research and perspective of looking at the marketplace and being able to amass the amount of investment that OnLive has raised, to be able to test this concept.

Well, as the leader of the largest publicly-traded independent interactive entertainment provider of service and product, I think Bobby has a very unique perspective. Number one, he goes back to nearly the beginnings of the rapid growth of videogames, from taking Mediagenic - which had started as Activision - basically out of bankruptcy. Through acquisition and opportunity it's grown to be the $9 billion behemoth and force that it is now.

To have the perspective of being in the same industry for 20 years - very few of our business or creative leaders from 20 years ago are still operating today. There have been so many rumours and speculation about the death of the music genre, or the problems specific to the Tony Hawk franchise, why would you need DJ Hero, Warcraft is stale... You hear all the cat-calls from the side, but meanwhile they've always managed to move forwards and find some balance in a very large portfolio of success.

I think that Bobby's focus on being financially driven to success, and to treat products as products, not necessarily as sacred forms of expression, has served the company and the shareholders over the years very well.

I think it's going to be very entertaining, because if you've listened to any of the presentations or analyst meetings - he's pretty straightforward.