Rose Amongst Thorns

There are two sides to it. On one side we're trying to make decisions that maximise our creative freedom. I guess a good example would be that we set the game in a fictitious league in a psuedo-fictitious country, so players have no pre-conceptions as to who might be league sponsors or what brands you would expect to see in that specific situation. That's done less for the brand side of things than to retain our creative freedom to tell any story we want to tell.

The moment we peg it too much to the real world then we're somewhat framed by what's happening in the real world and we're forever chasing our tails to remain consistent. If the game is going to be live for five or seven years, then people don't want to be playing the 2011 season. So on one side we retain creative freedom. Where it is restricting is that we've got to be aware that we've got a wide range of brands that will could be involved. Some sports, some lifestyle, some family orientated, some more adult.

While we've got the capacity to serve content to any age range, to any country on a case-by-case basis, we're not going to go away and create 18-rated content or be too controversial because that is where those clients would quite rightly draw the line. It does limit us on some of our edginess.

Those divisions have been quite easy to arrive at because they're probably the sort of editorial decisions we would arrive at anyway because we are an online game and we need to make sure that we're suitable for our lowest common denominator, which is a thirteen year old playing on Facebook.

I think it's a wider discussion than that. I think it's changing. Casual games were sneered at for years and maybe still are, then it was the turn of farming and social games. Advergames you can probably put in that camp as well because other than what Red Bull and Burger King have done on console, there haven't been massive development fees going towards their creation. As an industry we've always been keen to knock those cheaper products.

I think that what's changing is that the industry is recognising that a small, indie developer can now have the opportunity to compete with the very largest. People are rating, buying and playing games on the merits of the games rather than the size of the budgets. With that, you knock down barriers because you're no longer defining a casual game as something you play online that looks like it's cost £20,000, and a AAA game as tens of millions - the truth is, who really cares? Who cares who's written the cheque to develop that game?

I think the problem with advergames is that they haven't been conceived by game developers always. They've been conceived by advertising agencies retained by a brand to come up with a game because they've heard that gaming, with its interaction, is a great thing to do. That's probably not going to create good product. That's why I'm still slightly concerned that we'll be perceived as an advergame, because truthfully, we've approached it by saying, let's create a great game first. If it so happens that, by telling that story, there's some brand involvement, then fantastic, but it is secondary.

I think that's going to become more prevalent because brands, clients, people interacting with product, is going to be a very valuable way of game developers to fund their content. I don't think that there's anything wrong in that. As long as agencies and brands get educated that it's only as good as the game at its core. Some brands will fit very very well in translating to good games, some are going to be incredibly difficult to find good points of integration.

I can see a world where that potentially could change, but the core economics of the business are going to have to change first. It's going to take a very brave publisher to invest in that top end product based on that model today. The question that everyone is then facing is then, given that there is a way to support that ad-funded or freemium model with online delivery, but the cost of development has to balance on the other side of that equation, how can we do that? The user is accepting to a certain extent ad-funded content at that lower level.

If you wanted to raise fifteen million quid and develop a AAA game and distribute it online, you could. It would be a fool that funded you, but there's nothing stopping them.

That's exactly the point that we came to when forming We R, because I was sat there as a gamer saying, how can I bring high-production value to online games without repeating the mistakes of chasing an ever increasing development budget? If you wanted to raise fifteen million quid and develop a AAA game and distribute it online, you could. It would be a fool that funded you, but there's nothing stopping them.

BigBall, our film partner, had the opposite problem. They had 67 million people viewing their show, and yet when that show stopped screening, they equally lost those users and they hadn't monetised them along the way. Their problem was retention and monetisation, and my problem was delivery of quality and reach. In a roundabout way that's exactly why we founded the company in the first place. There has to be innovation if users are going to accept those different models.

Absolutely. How many times are games criticised for having poor scripts? Or when film has been used predominantly as cutscenes with little consequence in the past and we've ridiculed its production or acting? Gamification often misses the point, which Warren Spector summed up brilliantly at GDC last year, when he was talking about gamers making fun and a sense of reward from repeated actions. Games at their core are skill based, a skill at which you improve. The majority of gamification examples out there achieve neither of those things. Are they true games?

I'm not knocking gamification, but it's not games development. I think as people explore those areas more and more, they will realise what is a true game and they'll really take some lessons from it.

I think it's tremendously exciting at the minute, because no longer can anyone afford to be arrogant and say, because they employ a bunch of smart people in a games studio, we'll have a crack at it and it'll all work out okay - we have to go out and look for specialists in different areas and try new things.