Peter Molyneux Interview, Part One
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Q: So going back to the Microsoft deal for a moment - what kind of benefits did that have for you as a developer?
A: Well, the most important thing is that someone like Microsoft came to us and said "look, we just want you to create amazing games," and the reason we went through all the pain of setting up Lionhead is that we felt that we could create innovative games and we could push the boundaries of what people thought of games. We'd always put quality first, and we were finding when we set up Lionhead that being an independent developer was a place that you could do that, but now we've found that actually having someone like Microsoft as our partner is the only way of doing that - it's much, much harder with independent studios - especially if you're going to do a triple-A game.
So that's the first big difference; we are trying to build fantastic, amazing games not trying to survive, and that's what we were doing as an independent - we were trying to survive. I'm sure some independent developers can do both but we really struggled to do both.
The second thing is that you're kind of part of the family, and being part of the family means that some of the things that are closely guarded are very, very open to you. And that's to do with research, and some of that's to do with projections and some of it's to do with just the inner-thoughts of what people think when they publish your game - and that's very hard to get when you're outside that family. You know, you can sit down and you can talk much more honestly than you could talk as an independent developer. So that's a real benefit.
And then I suppose the last thing is that there's someone else to talk over the problems with rather than handling them all yourself.
