Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood, Part 1

I think we're fine, because I said, and I have said every year since we started, we're AAA or bust. There's no middle ground. If you can go bust making boring, mediocre things, you might as well take the risk and go for something as brilliant as you can. There's an old adage, I think it comes from the film industry, and I don't know if it's strictly true: "Nobody ever remembers how much it took or how much it cost, just whether it was any good or not." I don't think that's something a developer can live by, because there's a certain reality factor, publishers make a significant and massive investment in the game that you're making. Games now cost tens of millions of dollars to develop and produce. I was just thinking about audio today - we've been to a quarry in Nevada with 50 or 60 automatic weapons and 21 microphones, just to get reference for the way that we design our audio. We've rented Shepperton sound stage, we've been over to Prague to hire a philharmonic orchestra. It's changed so much, but fundamentally games are about interaction, right - so you need a whole of that kind of glitz and razzmatazz to be able to make something really compelling. And I guess that's part of what makes a game triple-A or blockbuster. But at the end of the day, if it's rubbish it's rubbish.

The biggest problem with game studios is it's too easy make the transition to working on many, many projects simultaneously and all of them being mediocre. And there are lots of publishers that are happy to pay for games knowing they're going to score 60 per cent but will be out on a certain time and a certain date. The risk with those is the studio continuously works for lower and lower tier publishers, until they're eventually dead. Or maybe they get some crazy venture capitalist or private equity firm to come in and invest, and really that's no different than the problem they had before.

No individual game developer is going to make the kind of money in the business market that exists today that competes with the money that a publisher will make for exactly the same thing. So if you're a VC or a private equity firm, you'd be a fool to invest in a developer because they just don't get a big enough piece of the pie to make that investment really rise. This is why most of the successful independent developers and independently owned and only ever make the transition to ownership with some fantastic exit, like the one carried out by Bizarre or Traveller's Tales or Rare, Bioware and so on... Since the VCs and the private equity firms can't make any reasonable judgement about hits, it's only the self-publishing ones that are going to do really well. That basically means the Jagexes, the Zyngas. It's such a different model.

I can tell you right now that nothing out here [the Eurogamer Expo] on this floor that's made by an independent fits into that model of world domination. Most of the games here that are really high quality are just like the film industry. They have a very passionate creative director, art director, audio director, technical director who's just trying to make something brilliant. They probably aren't being paid extraordinarily well for what they're doing, but they're incredibly passionate. You can see that happening whether it's Ubisoft with a massive production with something like Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, or whether it's one of the smaller things on the other side of the floor. It's still fundamentally that same thing. It's just a team. The interesting thing to watch for would be whether the games industry starts to take the movie industry's thing of having very talented contractors who come on board for the projects and see them through to completion, then move on and do something else. I can really see that being a good way to run it, because independents can't afford to hire staff, outsources only provide a part of the solution to that reduction in having huge headcounts - so I definitely think that third-party contractors will play a larger part in development.