TIGA is 10: Looking Ahead

Well, certainly we're communicating with other companies all over the world - we have lots of good contact with other developers of a similar size, doing similar things within Canada and so on, and it can be very collaborative.

But this is where we're based - as managers of the companies - so there is something we'd like to centre around ourselves. Do we want to have teams all over the world? Or do we want to have people working closely with us? Most of us would say that we actually want to work as part of teams, and we want those teams around us.

Yeah, sure, we could all work from home and contract everything out - but I'd say that's not the kind of existence that most of us have signed up to. We want to work with people around us, people who get excited, create an atmosphere and go in there excited about the next game we're going to make together.

I think it really does matter. Think about a UK in which we're not good at anything - we have no particular talents, no specialities. The world's doing very well, the games industry's great, but we're no good. That would be horrible.

If you could make a list on the back of your hand of twenty big British publishers over the last couple of decades that are no longer British - I don't think there's anybody. Most recently Codemasters are India-owned, Eidos is Japan-owned - all of the people running those places are based overseas, and I think that's such a shame.

There's an opportunity now - we do work globally and talk to lots of people all over the world, but I want to be proud about the British games industry. Particularly with the publishing, we've got lots of small seeds growing in really exciting ways - doing all sorts of publishing online, instead of boxed retails.

If the UK's ever going to be great at publishing again, these are the kind of seeds that need to grow - and that's why TIGA's really important in helping us work together. Look at the social network developers in San Francisco - they talk all the time, and you'd be amazed at how much they share, despite the fact they're competitors. What happens is that they all get better, and all do well - and it's to the detriment to everybody else around the world.

So there's a real benefit in us helping, talking and sharing information with each other.

I think the way that we've been making games has been changing for a long time - it's ever-changing - but it certainly has become more international, for sure. With every development we're always looking at people all around the world to chip in - it's not as if we're massively insular and protective. But it's still about where we want to base ourselves - and build something we're proud of.

Certainly we've looked in the past at building studios elsewhere, and have experimented with that - the wider Kuju group does have studios elsewhere. But right now we're really happy with the talent pool that we have in the UK - it's fantastic. There are people that have worked on those big projects, they've had enough of it, and they want to do something different - when they've got the prospect of working in 5-10 man teams and making decisions in that team by themselves, getting excited, getting motivated and seeing something that they've made happen... it's exciting.

I like to be around people who are excited by that, rather than facelessly outsourcing it to somewhere and moving onto the next thing. A lot of the people that I've seen at TIGA - that's what gets us out of bed in the morning.

We did briefly - we ran some figures recently as an exercise, but we're not seriously considering it. From a pure cashflow/revenue it would be much more profitable for us as a business to move to one of the states in the US - but the issue with that is that I'm British, I love it here, I like watching Premier League football, all of our staff are based here and they're not going to move out.

Plus the point that James makes - we've got some really, really good creative talent in the UK. I really think some of the best creative talent in the world is with British coders, British designers. We've got a great team and recruitment's not too hard - there are a lot of good people, so that makes me want to stay here. I think it's giving up if you just go somewhere else - there are definitely places we could go if we just wanted to make more money, because we sell globally, but I love it here and I want to help make it better.

Well, I think there's going to be a lot of what you might call fragmentation - lots and lots of little developers - and I think the challenge is to bring them all in and give them something that's clearly worthwhile for those people.

Because it is going to cost them money - something they won't have a lot of - and if you're a few-person iPhone developer, you may have a massively bright future, but you certainly aren't going to have a lot of cash to spend and you'll be wondering why you need the association.

Of course, they've got to make that decision individually, but TIGA needs to make sure it's giving something back that's worthwhile. I think that's one of the bigger challenges I can see - just keeping up with the changing landscape.

Getting the cool, new developers and publishers to join is important - and I think there's a kind of split happening between traditional boxed product developers doing £10 million-plus, triple-A titles and the newer developers doing cheaper stuff on newer platforms. That middle ground of A or double-A racers or shooters is falling away really fast.