Time For A Change

If you're looking at the retail data, like NPD stuff, and that's your exclusive meter of the health of the industry, then yeah. But I think somebody would be a fool to just look exclusively at that data to see how the interactive industry is doing. With social and mobile and everything else that's blowing up now, you can't look at just that sliver.

To your point about the doom and gloom and companies shutting down - in the last thirteen years we've seen it all over the places. It's just constant. It's a very quick-moving industry, very cut-throat - that's another reason to be in full control of your own product and destiny and much as possible. There's been several waves over the last thirteen years - it's a cyclical thing, where the big publishers say 'oh we're going to do nothing but internal development' and there's a big new IP push. Then a couple of big flops happen there, so they say they're getting out of internal development, shutting down studios, and then that yields the next round of startup companies, because there are all these people who got laid off. Then they're making new IPs, there's a couple of big hits so everyone's into that again.

Honestly, it feels like the Wild West to a degree, where the next direction or the next big swing could go any way. That's an environment that we love being in, to be honest, because if it's going in just a single direction it's very predictable, and at the end of the day the people with the most money are going to get there, and own that. People will buy their way into that. But when you don't know where things are going and you've got the cajones to make a stand and go for it - that's the kind of environment that we love playing in, and we think that's where we are right now.

That's a very good question - again, we're a very entrepreneurial group, so we're taking very strong note of these new arenas, but we're not chasers. I'll give you an example - when the Wii was released, remember how everybody and their mother was doing Wii games, and DS games? And now it's just saturated. I knew a lot of developers that were doing Wii games and DS games, and they were doing it because they thought that was what people wanted, as opposed to that was what they wanted to go do. The nice thing about our strategy, why I believe it is good, is we always are working on things and are going down directions that excite us, that we want to be doing. For example, Kohan - the IP and the concept for the game that was there before TimeGate was even there. We knew the game that we were building before we even had a company that could do it. And when you have that direction, you have to say 'what's the RTS space like? OK, it's saturated, but there's a lot of consumers there, and they want something new. That was the validation we needed to run with our idea.

Same for Section 8 for that matter - the FPS arena is crowded, but it's become stale, somewhat predictable. Yeah, there are going to be the big budget games coming out, but they're very predictable in that sense. So it's the perfect arena for somebody to come in and do something different and really make a mark. So we work best in that kind of environment - before long the social and mobile and that sort of thing is going to be that sort of arena. We're clearly evaluating and looking at the longevity of those.

Totally, we've had a lot of discussions about that sort of stuff. We're not walking away from Kohan by any means. It'll see daylight again. But we're not going to go chase and make a Facebook Kohan game just to say we did it - it's gotta make sense, and it's gotta be something new and unique. That's what keeps us up at night.