Dangerous Game

That's a good question! I can't answer that, you'll just hold me to it! I honestly don't know what to expect. I mean, we actually kind of came back to this. We're a bit of a strange bunch, as you know from talking to us previously. There was a feeling in the team - we loved the original Joe Danger, but also we had released it just because we kind of ran out of money, we didn't feel it was finished.

I don't think most teams would feel this way, but we actually jumped at the chance to re-visit it and to actually fix everything that was wrong. It's been a really cathartic process. It's been lovely to go back. We've kind of watched all these hundreds of thousands of PS3 players go through now, we've gathered stats and things like that.

It kind of eats you up, the problems that you know that you left there, the things that you left unfinished. I guess we kind of jumped at the chance, without even thinking about the economics of it. XBLA is obviously a very large market, it makes business sense for us - I hope that players respond to it.

We do what we've done before, which is to make the best game that we can and hope that everything else falls into place.

I don't think I can go into the details of contracts between us and Sony, but they've actually been really good. Obviously we wouldn't do this without their blessing. I think that the relationship is still good, I think it still is. We've got a title that's still on their platform, that's still selling well. I think the thing about Sony is that it's actually quite a small group of people that we work with - we work quite well with them.

I think this is just another step along that path, we see ourselves as publishers.

We all kind of get along together so I can't imagine something like this getting in the way of that or being a problem. They would always have known our ambitions, I guess.

One thing I would say is that we were part of the Pub Fund, and the whole point of that, which I think is really forward thinking, is trying to, rather than funding an indie title and trying to manage it themselves, they take a very hands off approach and they're trying to support an indie to publish their own game.

The whole thing, which they always said to us, was that they were trying to create electronic publishers, the next breed of publishers, in the same way that they made real stars out of certain studios when they started up PlayStation, they always reference that.

I think this is just another step along that path, we see ourselves as publishers. I hate to use the word, but we see Joe Danger as a 'franchise' now, an IP that we own. I think that's really positive. Loads of people have said to us that they've considered PSN because they've seen us do well, and we're held up by Sony as a success story and this is actually part of that success story.

Hopefully! Fingers crossed we don't crash and burn. It's a positive thing - good for everyone I hope.

I would love to think that it's going to become policy, or that it's going to become the rule rather than the exception. But I guess it all depends on how we do and whether we're terrible to work with!

It's been a really strange couple of months for me, because we've been working on this but I've been reading all this stuff in the press that I've had to bite my lip about. About restrictions tightening and how no games from other platforms are going to get released on XBLA. Honestly, and I'm going to sound like Microsoft has inserted a chip in my neck or something, but they've been really open to deal with so far!

We've actually added a whole bunch of content. A surprising amount. We've doubled the size of Joe Danger, which is something that nobody asked us to do. It just comes from our attitude towards what we're doing. Maybe if we'd just wanted to straight port it they would have insisted on more, but I don't think so. That's not how they've been to deal with so far.

I think they do listen, obviously internally they care about that - I've seen some mails go back and forth about different things - like when Ron Carmel posted some stats and was saying that developers are moving away from XBLA.

I think it's difficult to pitch yourself within the digital download space. I think Steam runs something that's pretty similar to iPhone, perhaps a little easier to get on to. Most of their sales happen at a low price point - they sell volume but not necessarily the revenue.

Something that is strange: something like Castle Crashers, say, that sells a couple of million copies each. If that's on XBLA at $15 each, that's $30 million. It's going to take an awful lot of sales on iPhone to reach that. I think XBLA is still a very large marketplace, still very much a leading marketplace, but there are still choices you need to make depending on how large a subset of the market your game appeals to.

The feeling I get from XBLA is that they're very much driving for quality, AAA download games and selling them at that higher price point. I think that's a decision, and a decision they're very happy with. I think there's a lot of other stuff that's been said about promotion, and the cost of getting a title on to XBLA that's valid, but it's still a very big marketplace.

From some of the comments I've seen, it seems some people think that it's a shrinking marketplace, and I don't think that's true at all.