Q: APB is the key product you're working on at the moment - how's that coming along?
David Jones: We're very, very happy with it. We're looking at a launch date of early 2010 - we've got the partnership with EA Partners cemented, because we knew we'd need to start building presence at retail, marketing-wise. And we've signed a deal with a company on the hosting side - so everything's going really well.
We're playing the game every day now, hosted internally - obviously it's a company first, we've never done anything like this before, but overall I think everybody's pretty confident that we'll have a successful launch.
Q: With an online game there's a potential opportunity to do away with retail completely - obviously now isn't the right time for that?
David Jones: I think you're right - but first of all, with big-content games, just distributing it online might be a bit of a challenge. We've basically got a full DVD. Those barriers are coming down, and the costs of doing that are coming down, but we're trying to innovate enough in the game itself without trying to innovate in the way that we distribute the game - we want to take some risks, but I don't think we want to change every single thing from day one.
It's just about picking the areas where we feel there is a good opportunity, but in terms of just getting the game into gamers' hands, we felt that was maybe pushing the envelope too far.
Q: Without talking specifically about your products, do you think there will be a time when the industry does end up in that place, where it's more profitable to distribute purely online?
David Jones: Absolutely - once we've got a better understanding... there's been a lot of talk recently about micro-transactions and average revenues per user, and everybody says the same thing - they're not quite sure what the correlation is, how you really work out the business model.
Once there's more data to work on and people are a bit more comfortable with the different ways of coming to market, it'll be a gradual thing. I don't think there'll be explosive change.
But we do have to think like a service-based company, it's absolutely right for our market and for it to be delivered. In some respects we should have been ahead of the music industry - it went digital pretty damn quickly. We should have been there, we're perfect for that, but they just got carried by the wave. I think we'll follow, but it's taking a risk - it depends how pioneering people want to be.
Q: One of the exciting announcements was around motion-control. Obviously you're not using Project Natal for APB, but as a game creator, what are your thoughts on that motion stuff?
David Jones: Well, it's obviously aimed at a broader market. Obviously hats off to Nintendo for having done all that, but it's interesting to see how Sony, and Microsoft especially, are trying to broaden their demographics.
It's kind of exciting. My own personal opinion is that Natal is cool, although having nothing physical is going to be kind of strange for core gamers. It's just going to absolutely need the right kind of killer software. There's this talk that core games can adopt this stuff, but I don't think so. Core games are really about having something physical in your hands.
I think that's why I like Sony's technology a little bit better in a way, having the wireless controller in your hand, with very high precision. I thought that was an interesting and good step for core gamers as well - but complete body-tracking? For me it'll have to be about that killer app that just could not have been done in any other way, apart from with that controller. That's going to be a challenge, and I'll be interested to see what that is.
Q: One of the titles announced at E3 was Crackdown 2 - what are your thoughts on that game being developed by Ruffian?
David Jones: Well, obviously we created the original, and you want to be associated with success, so we want to see it go on and do great things. It has such a strong following now, but it was one of those products that came out of nowhere, and I think that was indicative of some of the problems in the industry before - Microsoft didn't quite know what it was, didn't quite know how to market it. It was one of those sandbox games, and I think the success caught Microsoft by surprise a little bit.
We were always ready to start work on the sequel, and get cracking, but one of the big problems facing developers is that you have to know what you're working on about four or five months before your project ends - so at that point we tried to have a discussion, get things kicked off... but in the end we decided to plough ahead with APB.
The bottom line is that what we thought would happen is that a sequel would be done by a studio somewhere... maybe one of the internal studios, or others that they've worked with, and that would be the way it went forward.
I think it was unfortunate that it had to be with a start-up in Dundee... it is challenging to get enough developers in one region as it is, so that was the only little big of negativity to the story.
