- So you find a market for adventure genre in consoles.

Oh, Jesus. With Broken Sword 1 the publisher at the time, Virgin, was actually determined that it would not sell on PS1. They had no interest whatsoever. And we went to Sony, and Sony didn’t have much interest either, but they adventured eventually decided to publish on PS1, and it was huge, it was, for the time, it sold 300.000 copies very quickly, and Sony was delighted, and it brought in the market, so console owners do enjoy adventure games, and it’s good to the console, cause it to a wider market, so it’s to say, it’s really the timing, rather than the principle.

The Internet has become a powerful source of influence and allows the authors to get direct feedback for their games. How are you affected in your work by the comments you can read on forums and websites?

That’s a great question. Well, enormously, is the answer, but at the same time I’m also very aware that the people that make the most noise are not necessarily representative of the majority of gamers. It’s lovely to receive praise, obviously, but it’s even more valuable to receive criticism, provided it’s positive. If somebody is just negative then he doesn’t take any notice at all, this somebody and the people did write to us, and they said, “We loved the game, but…”, and that’s incredibly valuable feedback.

What I think is really interesting is that the big publishers are finding that actually because the audience now is so well educated, that however much money we spend on marketing, it’s almost impossible to actually sway opinions, because obviously in a previous era when there was ignorance you believed what others told you, people don’t believe anymore, cause there’s so much information available and the really good news about that is that the huge publishers, they try and foist on popular products, and they still do that now. And small dev groups like Revolution, can produce a game, which actually if it goes down well doesn’t need to be marketed in the same way, because word of mouth will then spread it, and it’s changing the dynamic of not any videogames, but particular videogames, I mean, very much so, the dynamic of how you market in a completely different way because actually marketing now is a very, very different role, and the bright marketers in this industry now say that actually if you market a game really well, a weak game really well, it would die even quicker that it would have done. So actually strong marketing can’t be counterproductive, which I think is great, cause it means, and I came back to a previous question, it means there’s plenty of scope for independence, for small people to come along. It’s a very dynamic market.

And if EA, who have a billion dollars in the bank, even they, with all that money in their part and their influence, it means they can’t force a product that people don’t want to buy on the public, and I think that’s wonderful.

When determining the guidelines for a game, what is more important for you, the marketing studies or the popular opinion?

Both. The fans’ feedback, they are very hardcore, and they’re not necessarily representative and THQ around the time of BS3 actually took a comprehensive marketing study and I thought that was absolutely fascinating, it talked about, this marketing company talked about different categories of gamers, what they liked, what they didn’t like and what was interesting with the Broken Sword, the people that liked BS, were not the casual gamers, because what’s also interesting is most casual gamers people go around in play parties, etcetera or actually living away from games so we were losing a big chunk of those people. But the people are really a solid group, actually, you now, who responds to the survey, who enjoyed BS, we have two groups or sections: the hardcore and then we got people slightly on the profile, and the people on the profile hate licences, they distrust licences, and I thought that’s very interesting, cause that then implies that if you come in, and try to make an adventure based on a licence, you loose the majority of people that previously played broken sword.

So I think it’s useful to look at that stuff, but the more valuable isn’t to, even more valuable is actually to take feedback because what’s interesting is the feedback that tend to be very common, people do tend to say the same things, but the problem is, that half of the adventure community want 2D, the other half want 3D. And half the people say the puzzles have to be complex, the other says they must be too easy. You always have to… you could steer a line between, but the point is that the feedback that we get, gives us the knowledge that we need to steer, and then we can decide where we pitch the line and so BS4 is being very much strategically positioned to try and keep as many people happy as possible, obviously some people is going to moan, they always do, but you know, that’s the nature of people I guess.

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