The Digital Pipeline

It is more complicated than High Street retail, and there are a lot of things that people haven't thought about yet - though they should be. So the customer's right of return - how does that work? At the moment it doesn't really work, because the consumer - if you look at the licensing agreement you have with the IP owners - is only buying the license to play the game.

So what we've decided to do at Get Games is treat consumers with a bit of fundamental respect - if they don't like what they've got, we'll give them their money back. Of course, the danger is that you'll get people just using you as a lending service, so you've got to put systems in place to prevent that.

Well, first of all, we haven't marketed to the Eurogamer readership as much as you might imagine, because we haven't until now had the offering that we really want as a business. That's now changed - but in reality the website's going to be changing the whole time, a constant evolution.

But that's the first step in the marketing - to talk to the Eurogamer audience, now we've got something that's up to the standard they'd expect. Secondly that's going to be a factor of more content, and coming behind that is making sure we've the positioning right. So there's a lot of technical work we need to do to make sure that people's eyes see different things depending on what they want - that's a challenge, but we're comfortable we can meet that, it'll just take a bit of time to make sure we have the right variety.

In terms of simply bringing more people to the site, then yes - Google Adwords is a big area, and we'll spend some time and money doing that. We've hired Andy Wingrave to run that - he knows his stuff.

It is getting much harder - and if we do our job, then some time in the future, we'll be in exactly the same position.

It does, and it gives us the opportunity to fight back. Steam is the market leader, the gold standard - and there isn't really a silver or bronze standard in my view. There are a number of companies that do this - people like Metaboli, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Good Old Games, Get Games and one or two others.

Some are well funded; some are well funded but coming to the end of that funding; some are very good ideas - but the bottom line is that it requires a lot of resource to do this properly. If you look at Steam they've got technology, content and the gold standard. We can only aspire to that, but we can exist in the same ecosystem. We're one of the few - if not the only one - who actually tells our content providers that even if their product ships with Steamworks, we'll still sell it.

We know full well that as soon as we've sold the product that effectively that customer has now gone over to Steam - they don't necessarily have to buy from Steam, but people in general can be pretty lazy, so if Steam has the same price and it loads up on their PC when they kick off...