Scotland does social gaming

The approach that we're taking is to look at this is we're not starting the company up thinking "we'll make this game, it'll be an absolute smash hit and then we'll do another one, that'll be a smash hit..." Our business model in the way we viewed it going in was to sort of assume that there's going to be quite a lot of things that don't really take off. But at the same time by virtue of learning these things and going out and trying different styles of products and the types of things that people really do like, you can slowly move towards things that are more and more successful. I think that when you look at the sort of risks associated with doing this kind of thing, relative to the potential rewards, there's never really been a better time to do this.

The cost of development is, relatively speaking, really, really low. The audience size has never really been bigger and there's no cost of goods. It's not like we have to go off and manufacture hundreds of thousands of discs and then sit and hope that they get sold. There's no massive upfront capital investment and so we think we have an approach to doing this and a strategy about allowing games to co-exist across different platforms and the types of games that we're going to create that we think has a very good chance of finding audiences. But our model isn't counting on us going out and having a hundred million users. If we end up with that, it's fantastic – but we didn't build our business plan around trying to recreate stratospheric success.

I think it's a time for not really being timid. I think there's a lot of opportunity and my feeling is that quite a lot of independent or smaller developers right now are busily at work on things that will become the next big successes.

150 employees is our plan to grow to. That number is tied into the idea of a long-term plan, and when we were speaking with the Scottish government about setting up and we've got a plan over multiple years to potentially arrive at that. Now we may arrive at that number sooner, we may arrive later but we're certainly not starting a company with the expectation that we're going to hire 150. We're starting with a very small kernel of very talented people, so we can establish core tools, technologies and the strategy to test product across a number of different genres and monetisation experiments. Then once we've established that we have a successful, replicable model, and then we can grow.

We've only really just started recruiting. Today's first press announcement is to some extent just to make people aware that we're up and running. We're VC-backed and we're looking to hire really good people to do something hopefully pretty exciting. That's really the function of it; we've just been so finished. The move back from the US... when I did it going the other way, from Scotland to US, I was in my 20s and single and it just felt like it was no bother at all. [Laughs] But coming back again in my 40s, with a family in two, has been a lot more effort than I could have conceived. We're glad to be back though, and I think it is actually going to be an exciting future for the industry. Unfortunately there are a lot of things that are happening in it that are just unfortunate and affect a lot of people. It's not great.

: I think it's whether you have the talent – does Britain have talent? And I think 'yes', it's always really punched above its weight on the world scene. There's possibly things that could be done to help nurture that talent but is it doom and gloom for the British games industry? I just don't think so. It's how it's going to pan out over the long term.