Rebellion: Byron Review was good for the industry

Rebellion CTO Chris Kingsley says that he thinks the Byron Review overall was good for the games industry.

"It helped to raise the profile in a way, and helped to answer a lot of questions," he told GamesIndustry.biz.

"But games is just one section of it, and I think a lot of the challenges are faced by the other sectors are potentially things that we'll be facing in the future. So that will be interesting to watch."

Noting that the Review recommended a shift from PEGI to the BBFC, Kingsley doesn't really mind who is doing the classification - provided it's not expensive and onerous to do.

"As long as the BBFC can cope, and I can see some issues with how they rate games - because rating games is a more difficult prospect than movies, which you can just sit down for a couple of hours and you're going to know what's in there.

"With games there's a lot more content and a lot more potential for missing things, or if you don't quite play the game in the right way, you're not going to see the right things happen."

Kingsley expects that the BBFC will have to rely to quite a large extent on reports by the developers and publishers as to what the content is in the game, just as PEGI does.

As digital downloads become more commonplace, he also sees a range of procedural issues that could potentially cause problems when developers release new characters, new weapons and new levels.

"What we don't want to see is regulation getting in the way of the games industry too much, but we'll have to see how that works out in the next few weeks and months, as to what actually happens," he said.

Part two of our interview with Chris Kingsley is now online.