Relentless Progress

It's both. There are definitely good examples, the Eurogamer Quiz, for example, where it's free to play and it's something we're doing in partnership with Eurogamer and it's not making a lot of money for anyone. What it does is drive brand awareness and lets people enjoy a game made by Relentless, which is more important than revenue at this point in time.

There are other games which we've got in the works which have a variety of more obvious monetisation strategies and I think what we're deciding to do is to look at each product and service and work out the best use of it. So it might only be free to play and be a really good advert for Relentless and what we do, it might have more comprehensive virtual transaction pieces in there.

We're going to make it cut-to-fit, really. You can't just charge people for anything - it has to be of some value to them. It has to enhance their gaming experience in a fair way. Or you can put in ad-supported features and stuff like that, but there's still lots of questions about the potential of ad revenue in some of what we're doing. We're just looking at every possible business model we can.

For something like Blue Toad, it's a pretty straightforward proposition - you buy an episode, you play an episode and that's it. That's very far away from the sort of freemium model that some games on Facebook use. So we're looking at whether we can use those methods to sell Blue Toad or whether we need to reinvent the way we sell Blue Toad.

It's quite interesting to me that the bulk of our sales have always included Episode 1. People like to try games, they like to sample games, they like to buy complete sets so certainly our best revenue comes from the bundle packs of the episodes. We're finding out on an almost weekly basis what our customers want to pay for.

The best thing about being self-publishing and being able to distribute digitally is having access to to all that information so you can try a price change, say - here's a price change, what if we add an advent calendar to the bundle, does that make it more appealing - turns out that it does.

I think what we're learning, both from our own activities and from observing other people, is that actually incremental improvement of what you're giving the consumer improves the sales. It sounds a little bit mercenary, but it's the opposite of what we used to do on a disc-based game. On a disc-based game you think up all the features a year in advance and then you ship them on a disc.

Now what we can do is think up some of the features, implement enough of them and ship, then continue working on that. It's a different business model, a different development model than before. Of course, you can have a list of 20 things which you're going to do in every ship, but some you will do, some you won't and you'll think of more you want to do after you ship. You try and keep a balance.

You have to make sure that first launch product is good and complete and works, obviously - but when you start improving the product you can pretty much give that away for free if you want. That benefits who bought in early and encourages people to see more value in what you're doing. Every single person who buys your game has a different reason. You just have to try and appeal to as many people as you can.

It did happen once before - the sports quiz wasn't developed by us. Although we worked with Curve on the initial release of Master Quiz on PSP, since then PSP versions have only been done by Curve, so it's not like it would be a unique and new thing to do.

At some point you have to see that this thing you've grown and developed, and cherished - built your company around - is not yours in the end. We've done well out of Buzz, it is a great game and I maintain that we're the best people in the world to make it. It consistently delivered high review scores for a casual social game. I think you'd be hard pushed, as a developer, to out develop us on a quiz game. Especially a Buzz game.

That's our ambition, that's what Relentless is all about. We're competing with things like the X-Factor for that audience. We believe that our games will be an equal competitor - and are.

We're also competing with board games. Buzz was very much built with board games in mind - as an alternative to a stuffy game of Trivial Pursuit. They're very similar games - you answer questions. That's not to disparage Trivial Pursuit, because it was very influential in the development of Buzz - but they're very different experiences based on the same core concept.

I would argue that already there are conversations in people's living rooms over whether to play Heavy Rain or watch the latest episode of Lost - and I use that as an example of a conversation that's happened in my house. I was absolutely amazed to hear from my wife that she preferred Heavy Rain to Lost. To me, that's a supreme success of how videogames can cross divide and actually be the preferred choice over TV. That's what we're trying to do, and I think we can do it.

It's not just about the main consoles anymore. Look at what people have plugged in to their tellies these days. PlayStations and Xboxes have a place under many people's TVs, but there's also satellite boxes, Apple TVs, Google TVs, internet connected TVs. They all have more and more computational power, and that's all we need. That processor power to deliver our games and the internet connection to distribute them and we're in the living room just as any broadcast TV is. That's my aim, to make games for anyone who has a TV. That's what we're pushing towards at Relentless.