Relentless Progress

Yeah, what we've done is look at our core audience - the Buzz audience if you like, is a group of people. We designed the game for four people. It was sort of post-pub. We designed Blue Toad for four people as a co-operative murder mystery - so we're very interested in that kind of family or social group that's at home, playing our games. That's where our primary design ethos comes from.

When we move into different platforms that's not always the easiest thing to do. We're looking at what we can do on mobile platforms that we haven't really looked at before and you can't have the same sort of social experience with four people in a room, but you can certainly have a social experience, as many games have proven - especially if you integrate connectivity to Facebook in those games.

Our Buzz game was the first Facebook connected game in the world, so we know a bit about how that can work and we've got some good ideas on that. We've also worked, as you probably know, on the Eurogamer quiz - that's powered by some of the new technology we've developed in-house. That's on Facebook.

So we're looking at how we can get to as many people as possible, and they're not what we'd call core gamers. So Facebook has half a billion people on it. They're not all core gamers, some of them don't even play games at all. But a lot of them do play a kind of gaming experience. We're interested in those half a billion people and presenting games for what you might term a non-gamer.

So we're experimenting with digital, episodic - the interesting thing we've found out with Blue Toad is that, almost a year after its first launch we're still selling it in different ways. We've had a sixty per cent uplift in sales through the advent calendar theme bundle pack. You can't do this on disc.

You can't have a big first weekend for a family product, you have to have a longer view. The bricks and mortar retail method doesn't really work for the sort of games we want to make.

If I compare Call of Duty to a buzz game, the production values in Buzz are exemplary - they're superb and I'm very proud of that game - but we don't have the kind of multi-million marketing push and development budgets that Call of Duty clearly has.

The whole retail market is becoming very much about pillar titles for a hardcore audience - so we have to find a new way to get to our audience, and that is digital, episodic, various different platforms - including PlayStation, that remains our main platform.

But anyway, back to what we're doing. New IP - yes. We're pushing Blue Toad onto different platforms, we've got some new IPs, we've got some new service technologies powering our quiz games for Eurogamer - it's early days yet to see if that's something we can expand on.

We're looking a launching a new game next year, which is a brand new game and we're also in conversations about another game which won't launch next year but will be a brand new IP.

Well first of all I can't confirm or deny the existence of PSP2. Also I have to be careful because my status as a Sony exclusive developer can mean my words can get taken a bit too seriously - so I'm going to answer from a personal point of view.

My personal point of view is that yes, there clearly is room for a hardcore handheld gaming device. Do I think that that's the mass-market portable system? No I don't, I think that's an iPhone or an Android or an iPad, those are clearly aimed at a more mass-market audience. That doesn't mean that there's not a place for that. I don't know whether I agree with any analysts about it, it's up to Sony how they address the market they want to address.

Who knows what the specs of the next generation of handhelds will be. They'll be comparable in some ways and not in others. The inputs will be comparable in some ways and not in others. The important thing is where they're aimed. If something's aimed at the core gamer then the core gamer will love it, because it'll be an amazingly powerful games machine that they can carry around with them, if it's aimed at a mass market audience then it will need mass market features.

I think that's a harder win for Sony. Sony's excellent at making games machines and consumer electronics, but to beat Apple or Android right now, I think that's a hard thing to do. But you can't dominate a sector forever. There will come a time when even things like iPhones don't look so hot. I can't predict that. What I can do is make sure we focus on creating the best games we can for our audience on whatever platform they have.

So if we find that PSP2 has a really good family audience who enjoy social games like the ones that Relentless make, then we'll make games for it.