The Jagex Factor

Registrations. [Grins, laughs]

No, no. I'm an avid gamer, I play most games. Perhaps because I consume so much game content I'm overly direct. Having played Free Realms there's very little I get out of it. To me it just screams design by committee: 20 different people from 20 different focus groups to say, "Let's have a little bit of this for the girls, let's have a little bit of that for the boys, let's get the six-year-olds, let's get the 16-year-olds." If you want a game for a six year-old you've got it, it's called Club Penguin.

If you take a brand that accentuates its own identity, it's going to resonate with the target demographic really well. Free Realms tries to be all things to all men and women and ends up being nothing.

[Laughs] I have! [Snorts] That wasn't the comparison I was drawing!

I think it's shameful. And if they want to come work for us, we'll hire them tomorrow.

Well, you know what, the one thing that Jagex doesn't have - and we pride ourselves on this massively - is egos. We don't have a rock star culture. If there's talent that wants to be part of the family we'd welcome them with open arms tomorrow. If there's a team that wants to dictate terms and wants the celeb lifestyle, that's not what we're about: that's not in our DNA. It's a shame, but we'd never compromise on that.

That's a tough question. We had a whole lot of laudable aims about what the game would be, how it would be a real evolution from what we currently have. And, to a degree, what we had was very much the same but without the secret ingredient that makes it fun. We had a gorgeous-looking and sounding game but the content was shallow. Five or six years of content - it wasn't shallow in terms of input, there's probably millions of words in real terms. But it wasn't cohesive: it was a cacophony of ideas and ambitious. The glue that would have bound the whole game together wasn't quite there, wasn't quite right.

We spent two or three months asking how we could make it better, how we could fix it, but we kept coming back to the conclusion that we could make everything OK, but very little of it great. In the end, we never wanted to settle for a mediocre game. With all the smithing in the world, perhaps months more, perhaps we would have got out a game that was like everything out there. OK works at retail, OK doesn't work online.