David Braben!

WCCF chats to David Braben on the Red Carpet

It’s obviously been a big year for you on Elite with Horizons and CQC, decent numbers for you guys with all the new content that’s coming out?

DB: Yes well the latest numbers are from the end of the year of 1.4 million but I’m really proud of all the people that are engaging, the community goals and how many people are joining in on those is just great.

And additional content for the future? It’s obviously an evolving universe.

DB: We have engineers coming out quite soon now and I was playing that today so it’s all very exciting.

And space games in general? Obviously yourself and Chris Roberts came back with kickstarters at similar times, is this a big resurgent time for you guys?

DB: Oh definitely, there’s a lot of interest in the sort of galaxy we’ve created and everything but if you look at it, we’ve not had space games really for quite a while and they’re sort of back in vogue but also if you look at how many are coming through now.

That’s right, there have been quite a few here at EGX today, are you a big fan of playing space games then?

DB: Yes well, one of the problems of doing your own games is having time to play other people’s games is actually quite challenging so I haven’t played any of the latest space games. I think No Man’s Sky is out in a couple of months and there are a few others behind it and of course Star Citizen.

So what about the recent resurgence of so called “dead genres”. What do you think has caused this?

Well there are lots of separate parallels and the cyclical nature is one of the important things. I think one of the issues is that the games industry has been most run by big publishers and it’s a very difficult job. They would contract to companies like us so until recently Frontier was working principally with big publishers like Microsoft and Sony and Amazon of course. What’s happened is we’ve now started publishing our own games and what we’ve done is we’ve looked at places where they haven’t been well served by publishers but if you look at the reasons for example the space genre, there hasn’t been a big space game for a decade or more and that’s partly because when a publisher comes to greenlight one, the best and most sensible way for a publisher to determine how much to put into it is to look at the success of a similar game, downrate it a bit and look at what sort of return on investment they would get. The problem is that because the industry was much smaller when there was last one of these games, you end up with something that doesn’t add up, or rather that doing a first person shooter adds up better so those genres get left behind.

I don’t criticise the publishers for it, but what’s happened is new ways of verifying there is a market there like crowdfunding is very valid and also just having industry experience, publishers are a step removed from gaming whereas developers like us are all gamers and much more in touch with it.

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