It’s certainly true that the number of stinkers this business produces has declined, and companies such as Microsoft release relatively few games that fail to hit at least 75%. But this is down to ruthless system; survival of the fittest.

“We spend a lot of  time in the first year to eighteen months of production on things that you never hear of because they don't make it,” he explains.

“We come up with an idea, a crazy idea on a piece of paper. We try to build a game around this mechanic, this story, whatever it might be. We’re spending a lot of time up front thinking through the critical issues that need to be solved before we go out and start talking about the game.

“What you’re actually seeing is a more stringent process up front that keeps us from getting into a position where we feel we have to ship something because we’re so far in; where the public is expecting this game. We’re better about avoiding a situation where we have to ship something that’s not up to our quality.”

Dead Ideas

“This process usually involves six to 18 months of a concepting phase. During this time, we’re not thinking about rendering details or memory allocators or anything like that. We’re really just focused on what is going to make this game special, what is going to be the differentiating feature; something that’s going to push our platform in an interesting way.

“The number of ideas that actually make it through that process, is maybe only 40 percent. That’s a sign of a healthy creative process. I don’t want 100 percent of the concepts to turn into games. That would mean our concepts aren’t risky, that we’re not thinking big. Obviously we don’t want to get some crazy percentage on the other side where we’re spending all of our time thinking about things that we can never implement.”