Supermassive's Geraint Bungay

Yeah, definitely. It's also very incestuous, in terms of where people move. I've only been here five months, but the guys in the office - there's about 80 of them - every time they go down to the pub at lunchtime, you see people looking around, watching what they're talking about, because of who's on the other table. One of the things I've found is people are generally very good about it but because I've been out of the industry for a while I was relatively surprised what a hotbed Guildford is. I'm looking out of the office window right now and I can see EA and Media Molecule's offices just from here. And we've got the Joe Danger guys, a fantastic new studio here too. The great thing is, with all these people around, they're going to come up with new and innovative games, and there's always the opportunity to go and do other things.

I think it is. I also think the doom and gloom stuff, I'm not sure how much of it is just basically a general effect of what's going on in the economy. When you read stories like Kinect has sold out, Sony Move is going great guns, the kind of figures we're looking at for FIFA and PES, who knows what's going to happen with Medal of Honor... Personally I'm waiting for Fallout: New Vegas. I'm not too sure: obviously there are issues, there are definitely issues around business models, and I think there's a need for all developers and all publishers to take very seriously now the online distribution model.

What's interesting is while I was at BT I built what was Europe's first on-demand platform. The big issue then, because it was based around BT launching its new broadband service in the early 2000s, was bandwidth. Which seems to have been overcome now, because people who want to play have that bandwidth. And companies are now creating delivery systems which reduced the bandwidth requirement, like Gaikai and OnLive. Secondly, and most importantly to me, it's the level of titles available. For these things to work, they can't just be library titles. A lot of the services which launched in the early 2000s were running games that had been out for 2 to 3 years. I think that what's needed here is to get the triple-A titles same day release as retail.

This is it, I'm not even getting my box or my manual or anything else. And if I do I'm printing it out on my own paper... To me it's a huge shift. I set up in the late 90s what was Europe's first online games service, called Thrustworld, which was basically a combined ISP and game server hub. We were pushing it all that time, but finally now the bandwidth is there, the technology's there and the desire is there. When you look at the kind of figures that downloadable content is creating for things like the Activision shooter games, or even just the wrestling games. The amount of money people are spending on the PlayStation Network to buy DLC... It's definitely arrived. I think the advent of the consoles pushing online gaming as well as the PC is really what's pushed things over the edge. And of course you've got the ubiquity of the smartphones, which in many ways are now mini-laptops.

Based on intuition and some experience, a lot of people are claiming that gamers are moving to casual gaming, but I don't think that's happening at all. Your gamer is your still your gamer, they're still going to buy their PS3 games, their PC games, but also you're creating new people like my wife and my daughter, playing Angry Birds or downloading Rayman from Gameloft. What you're actually doing is you're extending the reach of games, and some of those will then become your Xbox gamer or your PlayStation gamer. I don't think there should necessarily be that much doom and gloom, but what it does mean is that all publishers and developers need to address those new markets. But not of all of the first adopters will succeed. It's often the way in business that those first off don't necessarily succeed in the end.

At the moment it's a bit like the online rush we all experienced in the late 90s, like I did with Barrysworld. We went out and we got a lot of funding, and right now there's a lot of people making a lot of noise about social gaming, and there's some awfully large figures being pumped around for people buying, essentially, Flash game developers. We'll see where it ends up, but I think it isn't something you can ignore. If you think about something like the record industry, which ignored online to its peril, what the games industry is doing perfectly well is they've addressed it. They haven't ignored it and hoped it would go away. What people need to do now is to find out what's the right model for them.

Sometimes people try to do too much and over-extend themselves, and then development budgets go through the roof, and by the time they launch there's three or four similar projects already out there. Just like Big Match Striker - we've launched it, we've got a whole set of features that we want to keep going with to keep the game fresh. A lot of developers have these amazing ideas, but you've also got to add a commercial aspect to it. They need to say if we keep building it's never ending: at some point we've got to launch it, and then we'll keep creating these new things, if it's what the users want, we'll give them those new features. If they want different features we'll give them those.