The Digital Pipeline

In essence, the lead was that there were a lot of indie people contacting us through different means trying to find a place to sell their games - good or bad. That was the headline - that there was no real place outside of Steam, and indies just couldn't get a voice.

Of course, they couldn't get their products into Hight Street retail, whether at specialist, grocer, or even Amazon. There was a real issue there in terms of getting product out - XBLA was at a reasonable point in its development, and PSN a little bit behind, but we felt that the PC as a platform that people could just pick up and get on with was a viable platform for content creators.

Good question - it was an indie product, somebody we knew and somebody that wanted us to help them. So we did that. Were the results as good as we expected? Well, we didn't actually know what to expect. Looking back on it, it did rather well for us - because there was only one other outlet to buy it from (Steam), we priced it as well as they did, and we put a special offer out to the Eurogamer network.

We got some people buying it, which was cool, but that was the initial offering of the business, and obviously after that we needed to get more content, real quick.

That's all to do with the content owners - whether developers, publishers or somebody else - effectively having faith in us as a business. So stage two, after we'd decided to build this platform, was making sure we'd got content for the platform - which is really a logistical and confidence issue.

We had to use our contact and business reputation at Mastertronic - and at Eurogamer - to go and put ourselves in front of content owners large and small. So from EA and Activision, down to Terry Kavanagh, a one-man developer. We had to go and make the case for them to trust us with their content in front of the customer base we're building.

Our challenge is to make sure we've got plenty of content, and that we price it competitively. And within that you need to constantly add and refresh it - which is quite a task to undertake, because business owners are fairly sizeable organisations... and the legal complexity of those deals is fairly unprecedented.

So you find yourself in a business environment where you're pitching to somebody who's in charge of the digital section, or in marketing, or a product manager - because the skill levels aren't yet necessarily defined - and those are fairly easy discussions.

You then get into the contract stage - and it's always somebody else's contract... because the one we've got is perfectly good, but it's not their contract. You've got to get through that stage - and that could take hours, days, weeks, months or years, and that's a business challenge that we're getting over as we start to move forward.