The Wester Front

I hope it sends positive signals - if you do some good things you could have your game published by Paradox. We're looking to dominate the niche even further, and have quite a range of games within that genre, to fulfil the needs of all the military history nerds! [smiles]

People always ask that - I give the same fuzzy replies. First we need to think about how much we can really add to EUIII and it's three add-ons. If you ask me, I don't think we're finished with EUIII yet - I want to make another add-on, and there's lots of discussion we're having constantly, like what kind of DLC we can do, where we can put our time, and so on.

Look at Heir to the Throne [the latest add-on] - the original game was released over three years ago, and Heir just gave it a big boost, and we're selling loads of it online. So the game is still very much alive.

I think there will be an EU4 eventually - we just need to know how revolutionary that game can be, compared to EU3. What will it add that the game doesn't already have? I look at Civilization V, and one of the selling points is that it's hex-based... which I think is a bit weak. The intro movie was great, but I couldn't really see why I should play that instead of Civilization IV - and for EU4 I want that to be obvious to the players.

Well... we were having some discussions about Hearts of Iron on Facebook, where your nationality actually adds to the gameplay - so if you're German, you'll play as Germany... but Facebook is a new animal to us. It's a new gold rush for gaming companies - two years ago it was the Nintendo DS that was going to save the world; then it was the iPhone; now it's Facebook.

It has the same rules as everything else for whether a brand will sell. So if we launch Europa or Hearts of Iron on Facebook, it just needs to be a good game - because if it is, we'll make money. If you look like a game like Mafia Wars, it's not a good game, it's not co-operative... although it fakes that co-operation between players. I played it myself for a few days, and realised I wasn't playing with anyone - it looks like it, but it's a marketing method.

I think as the quality increases and the consciousness of the users also increases - when you see who's playing the games, it's people who don't normally play games. They have 50 million users, but as they grow more quality-conscious the games will get better - and the brands will sell, because people know titles like Civilization, for example.

But Facebook is very interesting - I think what we're going to do is tie our current games more into Facebook. So if you play Hearts of Iron III and invade Poland, you'll get a pop-up asking you if you want to tell your friends about that. You can have automatic Facebook or Twitter connections to your games - that's more how we see social media, rather than anything else. But it's certainly changed the landscape of games, that's for sure.