Tower Defence

It's called 'Free for Freaks'. It's a twist on freemium, so when to buy the game you receive the full game for free. As you play through the game you unlock content as you would expect, you unlock levels. The way we make money out of it is based on the old arcade machine principle.

If you remember the old arcade machines that you used to play in the fish and chip shops, you played through them and once and when you ran out of lives you had a limited time to put another coin in and continue the game, or you lose your progress. Well basically, that's the model we're using. Your first three lives, we give those to you for free every time you play. If you want to continue if you run out of lives you can buy packs of extra lives. The reason we've called it Free for Freaks is a very good player can play through the entire game for nothing. Whereas some people will need to pay, and the cost is $1 for ten lives.

It depends, but that's the general idea. Some of the licensed games may have other costs on top of that, but in each case there will be free content and this extra lives system. With licensed material we might have to put some kind of price on it to buy the full content.

It's an experiment really. We've analysed it and thought about it and it seems to be a good model and obviously having the game for free should generate the volumes for downloads and help publicity. And we hope that the economic model works well and we'll find that people are getting into the game and they're happy to buy extra lives to continue their progress and carry on. It's been a tried and tested model for donkey's years.

It's come back around again. Our plans for networking the games up, when we get around to doing that, they are really sophisticated. You've got to aim to do what the technology is capable of doing comfortably. There's loads of stuff you can do in theory, but it's what you can do that the Apple store can support practically, and what the internet is capable of doing. Everyone's internet capable machine is different so we need to try to be as universal as possible. We'll build on this and get more developers on board next year and keep on producing games. For me it's a really exciting time.

Every developer has got their own take on it. What we're doing and what I've always tried to do is run a prudent business. If people want big advances for their games it's not going to happen, that's not how we work. We work on quality and we reward that with what I believe is the best business model. It's old fashioned model but some developers like it and some don't. The best developers for us to work with are those that have got their own stable work for hire jobs and get a little frustrated at a that lack creative satisfaction. If they don't have the abilities themselves to hit the market with impact and maybe don't have the design expertise to release a title with all the bugs taken out.

The combination of what we give amounts to confidence and strength for small developers to get out there. We don't know for sure if people will take to our economic model or not, but we're confident with the tests that we've done we can succeed.

Absolutely. We can tweak it, we can play with it to fit in with the customer. There are some things it's just not possible to do on the App Store at the moment, but who knows, they might change. Apple enabled micro-transactions in-game and that opened up a bunch of opportunities so who knows what will happen in six months time? These games, from the initial idea to market, it's about a six month cycle. We can respond in that time to make changes.

I'm tired of not being able to make original games. These platforms are really exciting and enable creative developers to deliver new experiences to new people. It's really enjoyable as a business.