The founder Avni Yerli and Carl Jones, director of global business development, recently had a chat with GamesIndustry, where they chatted about some of the new directions their company is taking with the Kinect game Ryse and the browser-based game Warface. It was quite interesting hearing a developer like that talk about how they see the industry evolving:
Whoever gets it right, whoever gets that game that you can play on your console and then pick up your phone and be playing on that, whoever comes up with the game that spans all those platforms and gives their player a compelling experience, they’re going to win. They’re going to be the next World Of Warcraft.
It’s something developers are certainly working on, with Xbox Live support on Windows Phone 7 devices and the Sony Xperia Play phone that is Playstation branded. However neither of these have really done much, there is a much broader market and capability that this connectivity will have. They also talked about the next generation of hardware, and how graphical fidelity really isn’t the end goal anymore.
Obviously the whole industry had a great deal of difficulty in the current generation dealing with very different platforms and having to build very different technology for each one. That’s a pain that we need to be doing without, because the next generation of gaming at the high end will allow to put so much content onto those machines.
They weren’t too big on cloud gaming, and think the label ‘casual’ should really be done away with, which I completely support. It was interesting to hear their thoughts on the Wii U:
“The specs are very good,” Yerli enthuses.
“It’s a challenge for designers, but once thought through it can add value, and that’s what ultimately important. Our guys in Nottingham they are very happy with their tests on the dev kits and they’re excited about it.”
Excellent news for the Wii U if a great developer like that can get excited about it. Sounds like they’re in that same phase of figuring out the industry, just like every other developer is.
