NWR: Okay. So switching gears for a minute, I’d like to ask you about E3 because you’ve had a lot to say about that and because you and I have a personal history going back through E3. I first met you at E3 in 2000, seven years ago, and I saw you at each E3, I think you missed one, but I saw you for three or four E3s there where you guys were working with Nintendo on Eternal Darkness and then on Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes.

Dyack: Yep.

NWR: And it seemed to me that you, even though it was very busy and E3, the old E3, was difficult to do certain kinds of business in, it seemed to me that you really gained a lot out of showing the games to, basically, the public. Essentially that’s the majority of people who were coming through to play them, and getting their feedback and showing them things about the game and listening to what they had to say. I always felt like you spent a lot of time listening to their impressions of the game and their questions.

Dyack: Yeah, I mean listen--

NWR: As kind of like a form of focus testing. And I guess what I want to know is, when you said recently your philosophy that parts of games should basically not really be previewed in any kind of playable form until they’re essentially finished. Is that kind of a new way of feeling that has evolved for you over time? Because my impression back when I first met you was that you really enjoyed showing the game in an unfinished form because you could pick up so much feedback from the people who were playing it.

Dyack: Interesting question, and I see where you’re going with it. It’s, I guess, from a perspective of—I try to look at things generally on a complete industry-wide basis and so what’s happening now is our industry is going through some serious growing pains. And back when you and I first met there was an understanding, I guess, amongst the press that a preview build in general was not really, it was very dangerous to try and critique it in any way because it was just not done. So generally previews talked about, you know, some of the potential positives and maybe once in a while touched on the potential negatives. But by and large, the risk of showing early work was not very high because there was so much enthusiasm for the industry that people were just, quite frankly, happy to be at E3 and happy to see anything that’s coming out because they’re just excited and they wanted to consume it.

Now as the industry has developed and changed over time, we really are going to something that’s becoming the dominant art form of entertainment. And if you want, I’m going to make another comparison to film here and I know people will love me for this, and I salute all of my fans who are about to adore me for these comments. [Laughs] But the film industry went through a very similar thing where at first they would play movies and all the movies that they did would be like trains running into cameras and just the whole spectacle. It was very spectacle-driven. People wouldn’t even come in at the beginning of the movie because there was no story, they would just come in to see the spectacle and the technology of these moving pictures. They were enamored with it, it was the biggest thing. But then after a while, when people, the technology leveled out and people started becoming more critical and started saying, "What am I getting out of this? Why am I going to this? I’ve seen trains running into cameras." People actually started telling stories and it really started to be considered an art form. Which is what’s happening now with video games, people started to become critical. At that point, okay, is when the critics started coming on and critical assessment of something became very valuable. And being critical whenever you saw something, I thought, I think it does lend credence. And one of the problems we have in our industry, and we’re going through this transition now, is you have a lot of press who are just basically called enthusiast press. And a lot of the people in the press want to get in the video games industry and they’ll say positive things whenever they can but then they’ll also write reviews that just aren’t critical and we need to get beyond that. Because right now it’s very questionable whether reviews have an effect on sales. In order for them to have an effect on sales people need to be more critical.

Well, in either, in the event that, and I tried to explain this on the EGM podcast and because it was a little crazy and, you know, there was, just a vibe in the room, it became very difficult for me to explain that, essentially, as we move away from enthusiast press to critical press, which is what I think we need to do for the industry to mature, you guys need to be critical. But if you’re going to be critical, if you look at the movie industry, no one shows anything until it’s done. In order for you to be critical, and have any basis to be critical, you need to look at final product. You can’t look at something where the frame rate needs to be improved and you take the word of the developer that the frame rate needs to be improved. Like, I’m sure, Jonny, you’ve had a couple of reviews where you get a list of things that says "Please ignore these problems." Is that correct?

NWR: Occasionally, yeah.

Dyack: And how do you feel when you read those? Not very good, right?

NWR: I feel skeptical that those things will actually be finished, but I try to take it on their word.

Dyack: Right. But why should you? And I would say, I guess I’m a proponent of the critical press, I think you shouldn’t. And the problem with E3 is that it’s moved from something that was sort of a leftover from a toy show, or moving from leftovers from the toy industry, to people who are enthusiastic but would never say anything negative, to the point where EGM is, in their opinion, being very forward-thinking. And to some degree I completely agree with them, they need to be more critical, but at the same time where we got absolutely slammed for things that, for frame rate problems where, quite frankly, I have seen and I’ve shown, I’ve talked to you about some Eternal Darkness, and shown you some Eternal Darkness demos that were probably a little worse in frame rate than Too Human was. But they were never, they were never really focused upon because we were talking about the potential concepts and where the game was going. And because we had gotten a cover with them, or for whatever reason, we became sort of involved in this perfect storm. And if we’re really going to move to that, which I agree we should, we should stop showing games early and, you know, show the press when the time is right. You know, delay the marketing and show people final product so you can be critical. So you don’t have to be a fortune teller and try to figure out whether they’re really going to fix this problem. You just judge it for what you see it and you give your opinion to your audience to be as honest as possible. And it seems like the industry agrees because, pretty much, E3 has been reformatted, and it will continue to be reformatted until it’s in a controlled environment where you guys will be able to be critical and your audience will be able to give, you know, honest assessment of where the game is at. And I think, I think more than anything that’s what I’m trying to say. So if you’re saying have my opinions changed of E3? No, not really. One of things I’ll always miss is talking to people like yourself and, you know, others, Matt from IGN, at these E3 events. Because I loved it for that and I, that’ll never change. I’ll never not be excited about talking about our game. However, I will tend to be less excited for people saying our game is really terrible but it’s not done.

Susan Lusty: You know what, I’m going to jump in here because I think Denis is bringing that, I’ve heard him say this a lot and I just want to be very clear about what he’s saying. There’s two points that he’s saying, from this answer, just very succinctly. And one is that he was saying that our industry, from the first E3 to the E3 that it was in 2006, shifted. The art form, the games have shifted since 199—what was it ‘3 or ’4 when the first one was? And now, I mean that’s a big time, that’s twelve years, and in those twelve years the games industry has shifted from, you know, somewhat mainstream to a real art form. And therefore editorial has to shift as well. I think that was one point, correct, Denis?

Dyack: Yeah, well, it’s going to mainstream, from enthusiast to mainstream. Where people before, if they saw a game up and running and in the box and they’d buy it and they were happy. So the point is now, there’s too many games. There’s more games than we have time to play and we’re going to need to rely on the press to tell us what’s good and what’s bad. In order for us to do that you guys need to be more critical. If you’re going to be more critical then we can’t show stuff when it’s early because it’s not a reasonable basis for you to be critical on.

Lusty: Right. And he’s, I want to make this point very clear, he’s not saying change the process. He’s not saying don’t have previews, don’t have reviews. What he is saying is take that process and move it farther down the development cycle so that everyone can do their job properly. Developers can make the game and give you something to look at in a preview state when you actually can do your job properly and be critical. So he’s just saying we should still have the same thing, just move it down the development cycle. That’s kind of succinctly what Denis is saying. Correct, Denis?

Dyack: Yes. This is a very touch subject, honestly. I'm a little worried. It's a very interesting subject for the press and for the industry. I have to say, one of the problems of this particular topic is it's good for industry people, Jonny, it's good for us to talk about. I don't know if it's good for the fans, because the fans generally tend not to understand how things work.

NWR: Yeah, it is a technical press issue. But I think the fans do have an interest in it because it affects the way that they get their information, and of course the fans, rightly or wrongly, want the information as quickly as possible so they can get excited about things, and to plan out, and so from their perspective this does have a bearing on them in the end. We have some other questions that go back to some of the things you said; we can't dissect it all at once. But first Steven has a question about the new E3 which you touched upon briefly. This won't be about the last E3 and what happened there, but rather the new E3.

Dyack: Ok.

NWR: What do you think of the new format as it is? Last year and the years previous the format was, like Jonny said, basically open to the public, and while it was nice that you could get the public feedback for the games you showed off, it really distracted from the press doing their job. It was loud, it was crowded, and it was kind of an event that people went to for a good time, essentially. Specifically what I wanted to ask you about the new format is: do you think that overall and down the line it will be a better environment for the games press to fairly critique the games they look at and the games that publishers show them?

Dyack: I actually would say that probably not, it's too early to tell. But I think that these type of events are probably going to eventually go away, and you're going to start to see more events... I think that the problem with E3 as it stands, is it's too compressed for you guys to do your jobs. Last year there were like 5000 games shown. How do you possibly give any kind of assertion of any, like, you're going to pick 20 games at best, maybe even 150, but at that point you guys are staying up 24/7 trying to write something up. So this is smaller and more digestible but I really think it's going to move towards showing games when they're ready to be shown, showing them in a private 1-on-1 setting with the publisher and the developer, and you guys, being on a more reasonable pace to look at these things and evaluate them for your customers. So I think the point of which this is smaller, that's going to continue to occur, and if I'm going to guess, that particular format is all going to go away and we're going to move towards more private showings of things. As, quite frankly, when you do screenings of movies. You don't go to a movie screening and see 30 movies. You might have Cannes film festival and things like that but those movies are done. You know, you're going to a private screening of a movie, it's going to be that one and that's it, and it's probably, you're going to start seeing private screenings of games when they're ready to be shown by the publishers and developers, and that'll happen and it's going to make everyone's life happy. You only have to think about one game, and you'll be able to critique it, and give your comments, and people will be just as excited, and rather than having one place where there's one huge nexus of massive amounts of information, they'll probably just spread out more, which I think is good for everyone.

I'm so tired of the Christmas cycle, when 250 games come out in November. Why can't we spread that out? Everyone complains about these things and I think it's slowly going that way now. I guess that's my answer. So I don't think the new format probably will pan out, but I think they're taking positive directions, and I think the format of E3 will continue to evolve until the industry settles onto something where everyone is comfortable. You know I could be wrong with where I think it might go, but in the end it will eventually go to something where everyone is comfortable.

NWR: Okay. By the way Denis real quick, just to vindicate what you said, this idea of there being single-game events where the game is basically finished and is shown to the press, and they have a chance to focus on it, that is happening to some degree. I actually went to such an event last week.

Dyack: Oh, cool.

NWR: So those things do exist, and I can't say whether there will be more of them in the future, but they are taking place.

Dyack: I guess the question I have is did you like it?

NWR: I liked it, but to some extent it's easy for me to say that, 'well, it seems like a lot of trouble to go out there for one game.' Because there's a lot of infrastructure and a lot of other stuff you have to deal with, travel and meals and hotels and things like that, where it seems like for a 3 hour event it took about 30-40 hours of my time to go play a game for 3 hours.

Dyack: Right.

NWR: So for the press it's not very efficient. It certainly is very focused when you get there.

Dyack: Right, fair enough. And that's another thing that we'll have to overcome, maybe there'll be some way of eventually, maybe, digital distribution of a part-time, super-exclusive showing and you view it from home or from a certain place where no one has to do the traveling or whatever. Anyway that's just hypothesizing now. Okay, good to hear, that's good to hear.