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DEVELOPMENT FEATURES, INTERVIEWS, ESSAYS & MORE


RACING SPECIAL:


Five pages dedicated to the art of developing racing games P21


SURGING FORWARD: We interview


Wargaming about


its rapid growth, and developing in Ukraine P29


How times have changed


To celebrate our 150th issue, we gathered some of our most notable cover stars to mull over how development has changed in the last decade and a half. James Batchelor caught up with the faces of Develop magazine’s past


DECEMBER 2000 SAW the arrival of a brand new monthly bible for games developers. Staring from the front page, arms folded to emphasise the severity of his message, was Kuju Entertainment’s Ian Baverstock with a striking claim about the future of games development. His was the first of many faces to grace the cover of Develop. Last month, Baverstock – now at Tenshi


GOLLOP REBORN: XCom creator Julian


Gollop tells us why he’s ready to return to his development roots P34


DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET


Partners, a firm he founded in 2010 – and five of his fellow cover stars came to London to reflect on what has transpired since that first interview. Nearly 14 years on, the industry is a different place for developers – and certainly very different to the one Baverstock predicted in our inaugural issue. “In 2000, I said everyone should grow up, get to be bigger and small studios are going to die,” he says. “Now, I think it’s pretty much the opposite – they’re having a great time. They have a wonderful environment to be in, lots of innovation, they can make games for not a lot. We’ve got a proper indie scene.” David Braben, founder of Frontier


Developments, adds: “That comes from the fact that the balance of power has changed.


The power has moved from publishing to content creation. We’ve got a lot of services that have democratised the discovery of games, where indies can sit alongside EA. “The problem is a lot of previous developers haven’t necessarily adapted to it well. And I think that’s part of why we’ve seen the rise of the indies, although most of them are not doing very well financially.” Baverstock suggests that part of the reason some indies are struggling is many newer, smaller developers “don’t want to engage with the customer or with marketing” – yet even if the number of indies decreases, there will still be “far more successful developers than there were”. Meanwhile, Ninja Theory director Nina Kristensen says that they will have to “grow up and become serious developers if they really want to make it”. Kristensen also claims that as interesting and valuable as the indie scene is, there’s a far more interesting space emerging between that and big budget development. “I don’t know that it has a term as such, but


I’d call it independent triple-A: genuine triple-A quality, but at a much smaller


JUNE 2014 | 15


Past cover stars of Develop took part in a special roundtable discussion in London last month (above) to ponder the impact of indies, smart devices and free-to-play on the studios of today


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