Zattikka's Matt Spall

It's working out how to monetise it – that's always been the issue. I've kind of made a career in working in new business models. I was in mobile gaming before it became big and was trying to work out how to do that. I've been working on online games and online monetisation models for a couple of years now, and the challenge is really finding the ways and discovering new business models. There are a bunch that are already established but we're just looking for new ones.

Look at the way that a lot of other media has gone. Things like TV media is switching very much to a user-centric consumer model in that – I use myself as an example – I don't really watch much television as in I don't go and watch TV when it's on. TV programmes are shown to me when I'm ready to see them now. So with BBC iPlayer and all of the broadcast channels now you can watch anything that's been on them pretty much any time that you like. Certainly after it's been on anyway. So essentially what you've got is a video recorder that records everything that's ever on and then you just pick whatever you like.

And that digital delivery model is challenging a lot of people. If you look at ITV's model now – a lot of the stuff they do on broadcast, they're actually driving users online now to consume additional content. So things like Coronation Street is a good example – at the beginning and the end they send you to ITV.com to watch more raunchy scenes, or additional scenes or ones they can't broadcast. And what they're doing is driving you online to look at more content that carries more advertising, which is their model. But they're finding new ways to deliver that. I think what they're doing is trying to discover new business models for ways of creating more broadcast content. And that's really what we're doing as well. But what we've got to do is take apart the old model and try to work out how it works the new way.

There are people that are doing it very well already – again people like Playfish and Zynga – who have got the micro-transaction model of you earning bits of money and then spending that money within the product, but what they do is calculate it very carefully so it always tends towards zero so you always get to a point where you run out of money and you top it up if you want some more, or you have to work at it. And working at it tends to mean you're going to see more advertising.

No, I don't worry about it. I firmly believe that it's the next step. I absolutely firmly believe that this is the way that it's going to go.

There is a middle ground I think. It's going to be a while I think before a 2-3GB game is delivered over the air to a console. Harddrive technology is getting cheap, but how long it's going to take a 1 terabyte drive turn up in a console I don't know, because that's still a substantially expensive part of that piece of electronics. When you get a game delivered on a dual layer DVD that's 6-7GB, that's still a great big download.

The people that work in the games industry might have a 20MB internet connection at home, but even with that it would probably still be quicker for me to walk down to the shop and buy it. It's convenience for the user. Which is why probably the hardcore market might be the one that props up the retail. I seriously don't believe that the next generation of consoles will have standard media delivery any more. They'll probably have DVD slots in them but I don't necessarily believe that that's the way that games will be delivered.

Especially when you consider all the noise that's going on around things like OnLive and Gaikai, it's switching to this cloud computing model where the power has been unloaded away from the home. You're getting these phenomenally powerful, essentially super computers, in people's homes.

The choice has become quite hard for a user. They're like, what do I buy a PS3 or an Xbox 360? I know if I buy an Xbox 360 there are games only available for that console. If the next round of hardware that comes out is based around things like OnLive and Gaikai and things like that, you start to end up with a model that's very similar to Freeview and Sky now where you can still consume everything on both of those formats.

Exactly, and what it comes down to is that it switches the model from a hardware manufacturer trying to sell you their hardware to a manufacturer of some piece of equipment selling you a network, and it becomes a service that's about things that you're part of. So essentially it's a way of connecting your circle of friends.