The Wester Front

That's right - PlayStation has been very positive and open about the games we're looking to publish. XBLA has been around for longer, and they have a longer queue of titles wanting to get in, so it's been harder to get hold of Microsoft to get everything into place, and get into that line.

We're yet to get approval for our first XBLA game, but we're developing for consoles - you just can't really mention which ones you're on. Microsoft has been cautiously positive.

The exclusives discussion is always there - the first question you always get when you're coming up with a game is: "Can we have this as an exclusive?" Of course we want to sell to as many platforms as possible, that's no secret to any publisher, but with the right contract and the right terms we could do an exclusive - it's just that at the moment we're struggling to get a game out there on consoles, so that's our first focus.

In that discussion, I think PlayStation needs to be more aggressive because XBLA has more content as of today. So PSN is more positive towards new content and new publishers, such as Paradox.

Yes, I think so - it's the third time we've done it, and by far the biggest event we've had, and it was a very positive response. It wasn't just a media thing, but we also had our partners come along as well, including digital distribution partners. Both Steam and Direct2Drive were there, and of course Gamersgate... they're in the same office as us anyway...

Well, I'm not operationally involved in Gamersgate now - we're really only sharing offices. But I do think the PC gaming market is really friendly overall. You have coffee or drink beer together, shake hands and have a good time.

What I really liked was that the guys from Steam that came over were very relaxed - they're by far the dominating player in the download business, and everyone knows it. So we don't need to compare ourselves, or try to pretend we're bigger.

I look a lot at what others are doing in this business, and I'm impressed by a couple of other development and publishing companies. Among them is Steam - Valve is a great company, and they've done business for a long time. When you see how their product portfolio evolved and they got a dominating niche in their space - which is far bigger than ours - they got help from mod teams as well.

Look at Left4Dead, Counter-Strike - all the big games that originally come from Half-Life - so we started asking what we could do along those lines with the Europa Universalis franchise. We looked at the different mods, contacted some teams - Magna Mundi is by far the most popular mod, and from our perspective it's quite a different game from EUIII.

A lot of the mods are just extra stuff, or graphical improvements or whatever, but MM has something to offer to the gamers that EUIII can't do. So we asked Carlos, who's the brain behind MM if he could actually make a game that was good enough to put in a box and ship to stores. Of course, he said yes...

Then we asked him for a game design - if we gave him a budget that was x hundred thousand Euros, what would he do with it? That's how it started, and we discussed it for 3-4 months - then development started in October last year. We hope to have it some time next year - we'll see, it's a new team, a new thing for us, but a very interesting opportunity, because our engine is just as moddable as, for example, the Valve Source engine.