You're scheduled to give a keynote speech at the upcoming London Games Conference this year.
(Laughs) Indeed.
Can you give us a taster of what you'll be talking about?
We haven't nailed down all the details as yet. But, what I usually talk about at conferences like this is the history of the games industry from the past to the present and hopefully where we're going in the future. It's one of the most exciting industries because it's driven by innovation in technology, which constantly opens up new challenges and opportunities and creative potential.
New ways of creating games, new ways of distributing games and new ways of playing games happen all the time, therefore there are always new platforms and games permeate culture more often. Quite recently the iPhone and Android devices, obviously, came into their own as platforms, as did Facebook, and there are huge numbers attached to them. This is how you get the millions of downloads for a game like Angry Birds and how you get millions of people playing Farmville on Facebook.
While the traditional retail box product games industry has matured, there are all sorts of opportunities now where content creators can reach large audiences via high-speed broadband. Small teams can get to market with minimal output products and see how consumers react immediately. Games are moving from a product to a service.
Looking at the huge amounts of money invested in and generated by top tier releases, and the gulf between that and the outlay for independents, do you think that either massive publishers, or indie developers will create most future releases?
No, I don't agree with that. I think that triple-A product isn't going to go away, it's just a mature market now. Therefore it's achieved a kind of 10/90 rule where 10% of the titles derive 90% of the revenue. The big franchises are going to get bigger and everyone's going to play the same games. The games that aren't triple-A are going to disappear because people are going to buy the same games, and the rest of the time, rather than buying B-type games, they'll invest in apps or games for their social and mobile devices.
There are lots of things, however, that are created between the extremes of your 200-person garage-band developer and the sort of teams that create a Call Of Duty or a Tomb Raider. There are a mobile games, free-to-play games, browser games, MMOs and games that are distributed via networks like the XBLA or the PSN. These aren't what you'd call triple-A games but the teams that create them aren't exactly small. MMOs, for example, don't have to be the size of something like World Of Warcraft and can be made by a smaller team. There's a whole range of teams making games at the moment – there's no either/or situation.
In a recent report – which you featured in – on Newsnight, it was claimed that the UK games industry was suffering a "crisis of confidence". Do you agree with that?
I wouldn't say it's a crisis of confidence. There are a number of issues facing the games industry worldwide, but particularly for the UK, there's a crisis in that games have never had any support. The film industry gets production tax credits and they have support from the UK Film Council, while the games industry has been successful without any help.
The issues that face the gaming industry, and indeed all creative digital industries, are five fold. I call them the five Ps.
The first is perception; there's always been a negative perception surrounding video games. People and media concentrate on violence in games when only 3% of games by volume have an 18 rating. There's far more diverse content these days. Over 70% of the population plays games and yet the media nearly always focuses on the negative aspects of the medium.
The second P is pipe! We need better high-speed broadband to consume content and for content creators to be able to reach their audiences.
The next P is pound, and by that I mean access to finances. So many digital creative businesses aren't able to get access to finance because the products they're making are "fluffy" and risky. So everyone thinks our creatives are really cool, (laughs) but doesn't anyone want to invest in them? Not as much as they would in traditional industry which is crazy really. Manufacturing is fat and the financial industry is in complete disarray, so what better place for investment than in our creative industries? We are a creative nation. Our fashion, our TV, our music, our film and our games are revered around the world.
The fourth P is people. When you look at schools, ITT became the de facto skill-tree, which while useful, is effectively office skill. We need people who can create. ICT is to computing as reading is to writing. So our recommendation is for computer science to be considered an essential discipline in the national curriculum. It's just common sense. You can't build up the economy with a nation of digital illiterates.
The fifth P is property. In the UK we're very good at creating intellectual property but we're very poor at hanging on to it. Other people seem to see more lasting value in the IP we create than we do ourselves and therefore, I would like to see how we could retain ownership of it. That might result in a lot more revenue coming to the UK, rather than us exporting it all abroad. We're in danger of becoming a work-for-hire nation.
A lot of these points were covered in your report earlier this year. How much movement has there been since the report came out?
We've had a lot of support from DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) because, as you know, they asked us to do the report in the first place. There's been some communication with BIS (Department for Business Innovation and Skills). There's been zero communication with DfE (Department for Education).
So what we've done since then is, through UKIE, form a gaming next-gen skills group, which I chair. We're forming a broad coalition of partners who are keen to get computer science on the national curriculum. Companies who have signed up so far are Google, Intellect, several universities and many other partners. They all have the same wish – they want a skilled workforce of people capable of creating digital content. This absolutely means a knowledge of computer science and a fundamental understanding of art, because you need that in order to build what people who visualise content want you to do.
So do you think video games as a medium are a hard-sell with the people in charge of education in this country?
Well, I think it's changing because now the greater percentage of people play games and understand it better as a medium. The only people who don't are the people in the establishment, the older people who haven't touched games. They might be struggling.
But let's not forget that, while we are using video games to push our point because it is quite a rock star medium and it is interesting to youngsters in general, our considerations are relevant to all the digital creative mediums and industries. There's scope there for engineers, for the banking system, for the financial industry; computer science can be used for all these things.
It's not just about the gaming industry. In a way we're using games as a poster boy because it's a high-profile rock'n'roll industry. It generates $50bn a year in sales alone. It's going to generate $90bn by 2015. My question [to the government and other industries] is: "do you want a piece of that, or not?"
The UK gaming industry has slipped to fifth in the world over the past few years. Do you think there's a tipping point where we'll have lost so much ground we won't be able to climb back up the ladder?
I hope not. All I do know is that ITT as it's taught is outdated and boring. Talk to any child. They come out of the womb these days understanding ITT. It takes about a week to get them up to speed on Power Point and Exel. What we have to do is excite them. We have to put creative technology into their hands so they can build their own content, create things people can use. Once they do that, they can attach a copyright to it, build intellectual property and monetise that around the world. Surely these are the sort of people we need.
