>>Kirsty Wark: Let's move on to Sebastien de Halleux. You are a kind of entrepreneur
par excellence. You have Playfish and a number of other companies we'll talk about. But the
thing about you is that you started and were kind of ahead of curve.
Tell me how you started and who you started with.
>>Sebastien de Halleux: So we started doing games on the mobile phone in early 2000. And
what happened was that mobile phones were black and white and most people were starting
to get them. And we felt that this was an amazing platform that was not designed for
games, but a game was going to be one of the most successful uses for that new platform.
>>Kirsty Wark: But you're a civil engineer. You had one computer programmer, one civil
engineer, an economist, and a financial guy, and you created this extraordinary company.
>>Sebastien de Halleux: That's right. And as a matter of fact, that crew has kept working
together for the past ten years. So I think it's a testament to the fact that the new
gamer is not your traditional stereotype, but it is more a group of people who enjoy
an activity that is played together. We tried to do this on mobile phones. And we, I think,
have really come out of age with social networks, which have given us the technology enabler,
if you want, to make that happen inside a game.
>>Kirsty Wark: Explain, for example, how one -- explain how your restaurant game works.
>>Sebastien de Halleux: So very much like what J¯rgen described, the essence of what
we do is we've changed what a game is. A game used to be a single-player experience, you
between -- between you and the machine. And we've turned it into an experience that's
fun because it involves your friends, it involves people you know.
And the gaming -- you know, we tried to go after universal themes. One of the most universal
themes is run a restaurant with your friends. So we give you a blank Canvas.
>>Kirsty Wark: Like playing Sims in a way. >>Sebastien de Halleux: We'll show a clip
which illustrates that. But you've been given a blank Canvas, and you can create whatever
restaurant you want, from a sushi place to Italian, to an Irish pub. You hire your friends
to work for you and you can dress them up as bunnies if you want to. And you need to
feed them. Every three hours, you need to go back in the game and show a mark of caring
for your friends and feed them bananas or sandwiches. And you create this high-level
frequency between players in the game. The game is just there to give an excuse for social
interaction. >>Kirsty Wark: Shall we see something of what
you do? [ Video. ]
>>Sebastien de Halleux: We're living through an amazing time right now. There is a tectonic
shift in the gaming industry towards games becoming more social.
We believe there is a special chemistry at the heart of the game industry. Those moments
of intense creativity is what we are trying to nurture.
[ Music ] >>> All of these people who haven't normally
considered themselves gamers really get a lot out of the interactions with these games.
>>> They are (inaudible) game console. Played on the Web.
>>> The players are everywhere from Silicon Valley to Hong Kong.
>>> Basically, it is like rapid evolution. You try something, it doesn't work, you move
on to the next one until it fits perfectly. >>> Playfish games are made by people who
love games and they are made by people who have a lot of fun making those games.
>>> Really excite to go me to think about how people respond to it, to think how they
will interact with it. Oftentimes I'm guessing in ways we won't even expect.
>>> So much room to grow into that we're only beginning to understand the potential.
[ Video ends ] >>Kirsty Wark: So, money. Let's talk money.
Because originally you thought it was going to be sort of 50% advertisers, 50% consumers,
but that wasn't right, was it? >>Sebastien de Halleux: That's right. What
happens is that, today, most of our revenue comes from our players paying us directly.
Now, those games, I should specify, are free-to-play games, so we never actually ask anyone to
pay us. We give the entire game for free. Not just a portion of it but the entire game
play experience is entirely free for anyone as long as you wanted. Then what we do is
we sell virtual items inside those games to enhance the experience even better.
So if you want a fancy equipment in your restaurant or nicer chairs or a cuter hat, then you can
elect to pay for it, in small amounts, two or three Euros, or larger amounts, up to 100
Euros within a single payment. And you can do this as often as you want.
>>Kirsty Wark: So if you want a Kitchen Aid mixer, you have it forever.
>>Sebastien de Halleux: That's right. And we thought that initially advertisers
were going to play a large part in this ecosystem because one of the revolution, obviously,
is audience. As you see in the video, we have distributed about nearly 400 million games
now, and so that obviously represents a mass market that advertisers are keen to tap. But
what we really discovered is that players are so keen and valuing the experience so
much over time that they are actually paying us directly, although the game is free.
>>Kirsty Wark: Is it not still quite isolating? Because I know there are virtual friends and
groups. Maybe real friends, but they also have other friends that come in. It is still
something you do alone, isn't it? >>Sebastien de Halleux: What we try to do
is go back to the origin of game. In some respect, video games have been a kind of anomaly
in the evolution of games since thousands of years, which have been people playing together.
And we try to go back to those roots, the family nights around a board game, people
playing LEGOs together. And the issue is in our current society, most of the friends and
most of your family members are dispersed geographically or, if not, they don't have
the same time allotment for entertainment. >>Kirsty Wark: So rather than Skype and chat
to each other, you play a game with your cousin in Adelaide.
>>Sebastien de Halleux: That's right. But what's amazing is, talking back to payment,
a lot of the reasons why people pay is not because of the games. It's because of the
real friends. For example, Valentine's Day. On Valentine's
Day, last Valentine we sold about 20 million virtual roses, and people were buying this
not because the rose had any meaning in the game, it had not, but because they were gifting
them to their Valentine or prospective Valentine in the game. And as a matter of fact --
>>Kirsty Wark: The Kenyan rose industry collapses for a day.
>>Sebastien de Halleux: The interesting thing is we actually bundled a real rose or we offered
a real rose with the virtual rose, and we said whilst you are at it, you might as well
want to consider buying a real rose for your Valentine, hint, hint.
>>Kirsty Wark: So you can do that with a Maserati as well, then.
>>Sebastien de Halleux: We'll try that next time.
>>Kirsty Wark: So what are the tie-ups with -- because that has a commercial proposition,
doesn't it, that actually you might like to own a particular piece of kitchenware virtually,
but then you press a button and it takes you to where you can actually buy the kitchenware.
>>Sebastien de Halleux: Absolutely. The general concept is that it's a sandbox. Those games
are not proscriptive. We just create an apartment or a restaurant, and then we let you play
with it. And people actually want an element of reality within that virtual world. So when
the serve a drink in the restaurant, they want that drink to be Coke or Dr. Pepper or
a juice brand that they recognize. And they actually ask us to go and pursue deals to
bring that element of reality inside the game. >>Kirsty Wark: And do you have any idea what
the demographics are of your games? >>Sebastien de Halleux: Absolutely. So the
traditional demographic for games, as you probably know, is a younger male between the
age of 16 to 24. Our demographic is about 50% gender split, and our range is from the
age of 16 to 34 as the 80% demographic. >>Kirsty Wark: And do we know where they are
in the world? >>Sebastien de Halleux: Our audience is currently
30% America, 30% Europe and 30% Asia. And as a matter of fact, we were a global starter
from day one because we had an office in Beijing, in London, and in San Francisco as we started.
And that's a new reality in the game industry is that it's never served geographies like,
let's say, Indonesia because the cost of distribution and the cost of the friction in payment were
prohibitively expensive. Now, because all we ship is virtual items, we can actually
address this market. >>Kirsty Wark: Also, What is the most subverting
thing players have done to one of your games? What's the kind of wildest thing that's happened?
>>Sebastien de Halleux: Very much like, I think, I recognize some of the community element
in what J¯rgen was saying. People are making movies with our games all the time. So they
recreate anything from, you know, star wars to early black-and-white movies using game
as a canvas. So I think the most amazing thing -- and the
Chainsaw Massacre video with Pet Society, which are those cute little animals as you
saw there, was kind of the most interesting thing that --
>>Kirsty Wark: You say interesting. If that happened in LEGO, there would be a lot of
trouble. Has it? >>J¯rgen Vig Knudstorp: Yes.
>>Kirsty Wark: Chainsaw Massacre. >>Sebastien de Halleux: Players don't want
to be dictated what to do, you know. >>Kirsty Wark: The other thing is, because
we heard George Osborne's talk about -- we're not quite talking about the Arab spring but
we can talk about what happened in Iran 18 months ago, and a lot of that was led by social
-- Twitter and so forth getting around all the different issues about communication.
Do people hack in for bad reasons? >>Sebastien de Halleux: They do. I think that
as soon as you have an engaged community, one of the hallmark of an engaged community
is that the most engaged users care so much as to want to deconstruct what you did and
reconstruct it in a way that they see more are more fun or more fitting for their own
purpose. Many of this is access to the virtual currency
or trying to preempt the items that we roll out. We have virtual stores, and they switch
over at midnight on a Sunday night. But we actually load those items on a Friday or on
a Thursday. So people reverse engineer the games so they can boast to the community about
what's to come. So we think it's a good thing because we think the users that are most engaged
could spend their time elsewhere. >>Kirsty Wark: Do you solicit from users ideas?
What happened? Because you said to me earlier that -- you weren't saying this arrogantly
but you were just saying we have no one to follow. We are in the van, so therefore we
are looking to move forward. And I wonder if some of the gamers are some of the ones
that help you move forward. >>Sebastien de Halleux: Absolutely. We cannot
claim to know everything. And when we have games that engage community of 50 million
people, in those 50 million you have the best artist, the best programmers, the best, you
know, sort of creative minds. And they let us know what they want to see in the game.
They tell us that they want a pink Jacuzzi in the game next Monday and they are ready
to pay for that. So, you know, this is transferring ownership
from the creative process from inside the company to giving it back to the community,
which again, you know, those games don't belong to us. We are just the caretaker. We are just
there to provide the tools for the community.