There's almost a bit of a rise of the midtier game. There's a sort of an emergence of games that are really good but aren't the most expensive games in the world to make. Is anybody going to try and buy us? I don't know. That's up to them. We would not be easy to buy because it would have to be something more than money. Hello and welcome to the game business show with me, Christopher Ding. One of the UK's longest running game studios is Rebellion, which has been going for, I think, about 32 years now and is best known for games such as Sniper Elite, Alien versus Predator, Zombie Army Trilogy, and has recently launched its most played game ever in the post-apocalyptic action game, Atomfall, which found a really big audience on Game Pass. To chat about that, uh, making games in the UK and just generally the state of things, we have with us the CEO of Rebellion, Jason Kingsley. Hello, Jason. Welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you very much. Yes. CEO, creator, director, and co-founder is what I normally put on business cards that I no longer get printed. So, dude, I I I had business cards printed recently for the launch of the game business cuz I felt like I needed to hand them out, but I I genuinely can't remember the last time I did business cards. It's um No. Well, I I looked at I had a stack of unused ones and I realized I had a fax number on there and I thought, grief, when's the last time I've ever received or or sent a fax and it must be 20 years ago, which is weird cuz you think when technology comes into your life, it's just a thing and then it goes out again. And if you don't make a mental note of it, I mean, I suppose you start talking about Blackberries next. Yeah. your pager number is going to be on there or your This is the first one I haven't had an address on it. I think that was certainly different. Well, welcome to the show. Last time we spoke, we were talking about your your upcoming launch of Atom 4 and all the things you were doing. It's now been out there. It's launched in at the end of March. Was it everything you hoped for or how would you review the game's debut? I mean, super super super pleased. It's done incredibly well. I don't think as a games maker games are ever actually finished. You could always have found if you could find a bit more time and a bit more energy to sort of do a bit more on every game. I think anybody that makes a game will go I yeah it's not I could have done that and that and but the main thing is to get the game out there get people's feedback and get people looking at it. Now we're always it's always a bit nerve-wracking when you launch a new IP. Um, everybody talks about new IPs. Everybody really seems to want them, but it's much harder to convince people to buy something that's a new IP. So, you're always a bit nervous about launching something like that. I I knew we had a good game cuz I played it a lot and various people had test played it and done test reviews and things like that. So, we we thought we had a good game, but you never quite know whether it's going to be okay or really good or absolutely fantastic. and it's been absolutely fantastic, which is a pleasant surprise in today's geopolitical climate to be honest. How why do you think that? Um well, there's so much bad news out there, isn't there? Quite frankly, about the games industry in general, but about the wider um geopolitics, you know, trade wars and all that kind of stuff. So, the the news is a bit grim. But when you can boil it down to something that actually is positive and and good. Yeah. like releasing a game took a lot of people a lot of hard hard work and people appreciate it and enjoy pay playing it and it makes it profitable then you know it's a lot nice little sort of bright spark in an otherwise potentially grim world. I will say this like I think when we spoke last time it was you know there was Star Wars Outlaws done very well and Dragon Agent done very well and it felt like a really tough time actually this year we've just had that expedition 33 which another game pass title which done very well. Oblivion has done very well. Assassin's Creed did very well. Monster Hunter did very well. Uh, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 did very well. You've done very well. And actually, I know that there's still a lot of negativity out there. It's probably almost as much if not more than there has been in the past. But there are some bright spots and sounds like your game was one of them. Yeah, there are. Yeah, definitely. I mean, there be some really, really good, really successful games. I think what's interesting is the there's almost a bit of a rise of the midtier game. there's a sort of um a little bit of a an emergence of games that are really good uh but aren't the most expensive games in the world to make. And I I think that's that gives us hope for the long-term creativity of the games industry in a in a big way. H obviously I think what helped new IP at least certainly helped Expedition 33 is has been Game Pass. How was that experience for you? It looks like the numbers heavily skewed towards Xbox as a result. Yeah, a number of players obviously heavily skewed towards an environment where people can test a new game. Uh so free at the point of purchase. I mean game subscription services aren't free, but they kind of feel like they're free in some ways, which is fine. So there's less risk to try multiple games. I mean, I suppose you get refunds if you go on Steam, for example, and quite frankly, consumer rights mean you can buy a game and take it back to the shop. You always could do, but it's a load of hassle. Game Pass has been great mostly I think because we got a lot of exposure for a new brand or for a new idea and in particular I'd know the sort of engagement that Microsoft uh gave us. It was brilliant. you know, they they really helped spread the word, which kind of makes sense because they want to promote their game service subscription, but they've been they've been remarkably easy to work with. Quite demanding actually sometimes. It's always a it's quite when things are going well, people need more stuff to support it. So, you need more screenshots, you need more video presentations, and that actually kind of escalates. The more successful you're being, the more people want to show, the more new stuff you've got to generate. So, there's a there's a certain stress point, which is we're creating a lot of things. We coped um and it's good. It's a good stress. It's like being told to run faster by somebody. They've been um absolutely great. They've been really good partners to work with. I mean, a massive company, but lots of really, you know, enthusiastic games playing individuals to work with, which is which is nice. It's a breath of fresh air. One of the things I know about Game Pass is that people willing to try stuff. They're willing to shop around, jump around between games, things that they might not normally consider. They give that a go. We can see that in the data, but um that obviously creates a challenge in that they're also quite easy to disappear. They're quite easy to jump out and they go, "Well, you know, that wasn't for me. I'll play something else or I'm just there, oh, something else is there. I'll go play that because that's excites me more. Were you mindful of that at all when with Atom 4 or did you not think about that potential? Do you worry about it a little bit in the abstract? But basically, I don't think any game that has ever been made will be liked by everybody. Everybody's got different tastes. Everybody's individual. Some games are liked by most of the people playing, but somebody will just not resonate with the game you're making. And that's fine. That's how it works. Same with art, same with movies, same with TV shows, books, any creative endeavor will get to a subset of the audience. Yeah. And a subset of that audience will like it. Hopefully, a big group and a small group won't like it and we'll want a refund. So, um the challenge is getting to the biggest group possible. Yeah. The challenge, I think, in in today's crowded media space because we're all we're all we're all short of time. Um, there's only so many hours we can spend watching streaming video or YouTube or reading books or going out for walks. You know, we all got limited time. So, what we're actually competing about is quality of product obviously, but awareness. You can make the best game in the world, but if nobody's ever heard of it, you never release it, nobody's ever going to play it. Yeah. Um and arguably you could look at the other end of that equation which is there are some games which are not particularly sophisticated that have gone to incredibly wide audiences. You know some games in the mobile space for example are not technically difficult to make but have have gone to a very very wide kind of a wide casual audience and and hundreds of millions of people play them. So somewhere on that curve, uh you've got to find your your space if you're trying to make a a more traditional kind of console title. And that's harder to do when the media space is so fractured and audiences are are not, you know, the days in when we all watch the same four TV channels. Yeah. Read the same newspapers and all that kind of stuff. Thursday evening, what was it? Top of the Pops. Was it Tomorrow's World? Top of the Pops. Can't remember. Came back from school on Thursday evening on the telly was the Yeah. the evening, you know, it's almost the start of the weekend, you know, and everybody shared that. So, Friday you'll be talking about what was on top of the pops. Um, but that's all gone now. That whole landscape has shifted. Yeah. Entirely. When I was talking about the game pass, the fact that people might bounce off it. I I was referring to, are you mindful of the fact that hang on, we need to make sure we have all the good stuff in the first hour and so that people people like it, they they'll see it straight away. Yeah. I mean, you you don't put all your good stuff. you obviously are very mindful of people's first impressions of the game. You know, the the the beginning of a game has got to hook people like the beginning of a video you make. Um like the beginning of an article you write, you know, if you if you don't tell people, I mean, isn't there a phrase burying the lead? Yeah. In journalism, you got to tell people a reason to keep reading. You have to do the same in making a game or doing a YouTube video because people can swipe away pictures all the time. So, yeah, very mindful of that. But you also got to introduce the concepts of the game. You've got to intrigue and you've got to not challenge too much either because you don't want people dying straight away because then they might go this game's too difficult. And there is still very very difficult games in the world, but you also want to try and get people into your game before you kill them straight away. Indeed. Well, you made a very British game in Atom 4. It's set I think in the Lake District which is I think especially unique and I love the stats you put out. 3.7 million kills using the cricket bat or 4 million pasties and three 300,000 cups of tea have been consumed. You don't get much more British than cricket pasties and tea. Um so uh why why was that important to you? Why was it important that you made such a quintessential uh local game I guess? Well, I've always been champion for the British industry. And now I set up Tiger, a games industry development representative body at the time when there was only one trade body that was elsewhere. That was the publishers association. And you couldn't join it if you're a games developer because even just the people that made games, they were the people that published them. That was back in the in the uh the bad old days, I suppose, of publishing slots in consoles and permissions and all that kind of thing. That's all gone away again. So it'll be written about in history books, but it was an interesting time to be trying to make games. Technology was very different. Expectations were different. But I've always felt that there's a the British culture is is is slightly under represented in games. You know, there's lots of Americanism and even the science fiction science fiction worlds are often quite Americanized. They're quite big, you know, lots of heavy gunfire in it and sort of um less subtlety perhaps and and less ironic comedy. I I quite like my sort of slightly self-parodying aspects of British culture. You know, we're making fun of our own culture like cricket batching, pastas, and cups of tea knowingly. And that's part of our culture is that sort of self-reference, self-deprecation. I also thought the lake district's a beautiful place and should be explored. But I was very keen. It was my idea in the first place. I wanted to juxtapose the beautiful countryside with the sort of apocalyptic weirdness. Yeah. I wanted you I imagined walking down a beautiful landscape thing is lovely and then seeing a crashed helicopter and the sort of the juxtaposition of the two will kind of make you go that's weird. That's really weird and and slightly unsettle you. And I've always been interested in the types of science fiction that ask questions about society. I really like going into cities by um railways because you see you go into that railway that you you know you look out of the window, you see the sort of industrial hinterland that's not meant to be seen. You've got piles of things and you've got rubbish and you've got the backs of people's houses. And I find that really interesting because it's not the facade. It's the back end of things and and it it's sort of not designed to be looked at and therefore more honest in some ways. Mhm. Well, I definitely think that came across philos bit philosophical there. Sorry. No, no. Well, that's that's that's the creative element of of what it is you're trying to do. And I think that's one of the reasons why it resonated, you know, certainly before its release was because it looked different and it had a style and and a uniqueness to it, which you need to have in today's games market really in order to find an audience. I think so. There's a little test we sometimes do internally, which is if you take a screenshot, can you guess which game the screenshots from without knowing? There are an awful lot of games that fail that test. You know, you see yet another sort of brightly colored science fictiony shooter. You didn't know it was a screenshot from Game X because you made it. Could you guess that it was or does it blend into every other shiny future science fiction game? And the answer is sometimes yes. The answer is sometimes no games. You know, Oblivion, the recent remake, you know, you can see you can tell from a screenshot that's Oblivion. Expedition 33. I think you can pretty much tell what that game is from a screenshot. So, you got to have a little bit of difference. Doesn't mean the game needs to be completely stylized or or weird, but is there something that makes that game look a bit different than all the other games? Yeah. No, I think you I think that's certainly true of Atom for I'll go back to your comment about the UK because obviously you are keen supporter of the UK development scene and you did you know help out set up Tiger. I'm interested to know your take on how things are in the UK at the moment because so many of the big studios now seem to be under US or Chinese ownership. How are you feeling about the development scene in in Britain at the minute? Well, very very mixed. I would say there are some high spots and there are some low spots. A lot of people losing their jobs which is awful. Not through their fault which is even worse. You know, somebody can just be doing a a job and getting on with making good games. and suddenly they lose their job because somebody external has decided to change the structure. That's horrible. If you're failing then understandably, you know, you get the consequences of that. But if it's not your fault, that's that's harsh. But there are bright spots. There's a lot of indie stuff starting up as well. So when you get these collapses, you do get indie studios starting up and trying. And it's never been easier to actually get a game to the market than now. You know, there's very little barriers to actually getting a game in front of an audience. And social media means that you could also communicate with people. You could talk to influencers relatively free. You know, if your game's good enough, people will talk about it and YouTube videos or on various of the different social channels. So, you can grab attention, but there's an awful lot out there. So, the other side of that is it's really hard to stand above the crowd and get noticed. And so it's easier than ever to make a game, but it's probably harder than ever to make that game successful. Yeah. And get that funding in the first place, I guess. Yeah. As well, can be quite tricky. You don't necessarily need funding either, though. You can, you know, you one person can make a game these days and make it successful. There are various games that have been successful actually. You look into it and there's an awful lot of outsourcing gone on and you know, other people have helped out. But again, there are libraries of content you can buy. Yeah. You can go to the various of the libraries and you can say I want to license that set of trees for my game set in a wood and yeah they're the same trees that other people will be using but if you like them differently and arrange them differently people might not notice and it's relatively inexpensive. So yeah I I would say my assessment would be um mixed. Yeah. Oddly made me think of undisputed the boxing game came out last year which obviously that was like three guys in the room to begin with and then of course they got money but they built something first and um and probably with next to nothing. Um really yes. Yeah. You always have to look behind the hype a bit. So sometimes you know as we we're all in the industry you sort of know things you know and people claim that it was done by one person. You go yeah one person very talented well done. but lots of outsourcers and the animation was done by a separate team in a different part of the world. It's brilliant. They did a really good job and the engine is done by somebody else. And you add that all up and you're talking about well over 150 to 200 people to make the game. Yeah. But the core team is whatever you know is relatively small. Yeah. It seems to be where a lot of things are heading anyway. Well, we talked about this earlier that the market field is quite inconsistent at the moment. for every uh surprise hit we're getting a shock disappointment and particularly the case in 2024. Um how is that affecting you at at Rebellion in terms of of of or is it affecting you in terms of what you're doing and what how how you're thinking? Not really no because the way we try to make games is Chris and I come up with the ideas and we try to make games that we want to play. We don't do much in the way of market research or try to analyze gameplay trends and jump on the back of them or any of that kind of stuff. Uh, partly because I just don't have the appetite for making creative decisions like that and partly because we set up Rebellion back in the day cuz we wanted to make games and that's what we want to keep doing. We want to keep making games and entertaining people. So, we don't really follow trends if we can avoid it. We we we try not to follow trends. What we try to do is come up with an idea that we think resonates and perhaps when we talk about the idea, everybody in the room sits forward and goes, "Yeah, that's an interesting idea." And that generally speaking translates to a successful game. Um because it means other people will think it's an interesting idea. And then we very carefully control budgets, very carefully control them because you can spend an awful lot of money on a game as we know. You can spend hundreds of millions literally. You know, some people are talking about, isn't GTA, the next GTA rumored to be up in the billion or something? Yeah, I'm sure. Yeah. Something mad. It's like, holy moly, how do you spend that much money? Well, it'll be a great game and it'll sell really well, but that's a lot of responsibility. Our games are not anywhere near the scale of investment of a of a, you know, of an Ubisoft game, for example. They just don't have so many people working on them. And you could argue they are not nearly as big either. No, for that reason we try to keep budgets at a sensible level so that we are pretty confident we can sell enough to make the money back and then hopefully make make a profit at the end of the day which is generally speaking what we've managed to do for our whole career. Yeah, it's going back to core principles. because I feel a lot of companies having to do that right now, which is look at your margins, budget responsibly, try and make a game that's focused. You know who your audience is, whether that's a new IP or an established one. And so, I think there's a level of clarity about the video games business at the moment in terms of that approach to making games. You don't necessarily spend half a billion on a video game that you don't really, you know, where the audience is really wide and and you're having to throw it everything in the kitchen sink at 100 hour experience. At least it will still work for some games. It will work for GTA. It will work for Assassin's Creed. It will work with games of certain scale, but for a lot of people, it's probably not the best approach at the moment. Well, it's impossible if you don't have the money. You literally can't do that. So, you got to do it differently. And I'm not saying we don't spend significant amounts of money. We do. You know, our budgets are many millions of pounds. So, that's quite a big sum of money, quite frankly. Um, I mean, it pales into insignificance compared to the top end of games, but also we're spending a ton more than a lot of indie studios. Yeah. you know, so we we sort of sit in this some people call it this comfortable middle ground and other people call it an uncomfortable middle ground. Yeah. I don't know what it is. It seems to work for us though. Live service games are lucrative but challenging at the moment and I know that you were working on one you had been working on one with 10 cent which you're not doing anymore. Is that a space you're still interested in or is that an example of not doing what everyone else is doing? That was a bit of a one-off. We don't do work for high. They work for other people. But Tensson were very we were very keen to learn about how Tensson worked and Tensson were very keen to learn how we worked and I think there was a there was a mutual interest in learning from each other. Um and um at the end I think we both we we walked away because we felt the market had shifted entirely. You know we still have great relationships with them. It was one of those business opportunities that didn't get to the ultimate end that we were hoping for. So, so yeah, it was it was interesting and and tensions are a really good company. They're really interesting company. They're huge though. So, it depends who you're talking to. It was like um like an elephant that's as big as the horizon, you know, you're not quite sure which bit of the elephant you're actually talking to, but but there's a lot of very talented people there. Cultural differences, of course. You know, working with the Chinese is is always a learning experience. That's always wonderful. I like learning about new cultures and different ways of communicating. Languages were different. And of course in China, they have many different languages, not just Chinese. They got lots of different types of Chinese. And that was interesting for them also to listen to our different accents because we've got people up in the north of England and, you know, up in Ronghorn and down south. And some of those accents are easier for some people to understand when people are speaking English. Uh, and that was quite funny cuz we were we were also working on Atom at the time and we were using a lot of regional actors, you know, you know, using their genuine Yeah. regional accents to show some of the characters cuz I was very keen. I didn't want to just have Cumberland accents. I wanted a whole bunch of different regional accents. I actually said to the team, I don't want any southern accents. If we can avoid it, there'll be a few in there. They need to be because of the story. I don't want any cheeky cotton. If we can avoid it again, maybe one or two, but I'm not having the whole cheeky cotney thing. Can we have Scottish accents, Welsh accents, northern Welsh accents, you know, puddling accents, accents from the Black Country for Cornwall, all parts of it, all interesting areas. And that's what they did. And we we've got some brilliant actors. What's interesting in that is that a lot of voice actors, professional voice actors have a professional voice that is sort of more or less the way I speak in some ways where sort of RP I guess you could call it that. But when you ask them, they're slightly less comfortable acting in their actual accent, their kind of family accent. We said, look, how would you speak to your mom and dad? You know, how do you speak to your children? How do you speak to your neighbors? Can we use that please? And if you've got any ideas about slang or phrases, you know, we want to know what they are. Are the regional insults? You We got a lot of regional insults in the game, which is cool. Yeah. The Chinese was was was a bit lost in that, did they? Well, yes. I mean, well, quite frankly, I think a lot of our North American um viewers were quite lost by some of those, too. So, you shifted away from live service after that. But you've I think you've got if you got a VR game out in May, have I got that right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, we keep our hand in in VR. I think it's an interesting space. Yeah, it actually things sell quite well, but it's sort of a bit under the radar. Yeah, in a sort of weird way. I was going to say, is it is it a viable space for you? Yeah, it is. It's not not as big as the mainstream, but it is still very very good. And you look at the numbers, you look at the data going, that's actually really good. Why are we not doing more of these? I think it's Zombie Army VR May 22nd. I think it's it's out according to the the information that's just been provided to me. Well, you've got these successful bands that you've been developing your own IP. You've got but you've also got beyond that, beyond your games, you've got your media production stuff that you do. You've got your I say comic publishing division, but it's not just comics, it's novels and all sorts of things that you got. Comics and books and board games. Yeah. Top board games. Yeah. Rebellion unplugged. Yeah. And it seems to be overall broadly very stable business. But how do you and the answer might be we're not interested in this. But how do you take that next step up? Are you you looking for that? Are you looking for that next stage? You looking for partners to sort of help you go to the next level or are you kind of comfortable where you are? The default is to keep doing what we do cuz we enjoy it and it's successful. So Chris and I always say long as have a long conversation with somebody and you know if they want to buy us an expensive um meal at a restaurant, we'll we'll we'll chat to them about it um somewhere nice. I don't know. I think we're we're quite um protective of the success of what we've got. We don't gamble wildly on, you know, one roll of the dice. I want to be able to give people jobs as long as they want a job with me. I want to pay them well and I want them to feel stable so that because I know we've got a lot of responsibility to people that work for us. the people that work for us at broadly speaking getting older and they start to have families and those families have ties that bind them and yet therefore you start to have as a as a boss of a company I think you should feel you have responsibility towards people that you employ and and arguably the people that play your games as well. This is why we try and make games that um are accessible and by accessible I don't mean people necessarily who are diff you know disabled. I mean, people that have less time or aren't so good at playing games as they used to be or just don't want to commit to spending 100 hours playing this game. They just want to enjoy themselves in those sort of halfhour gameplay sessions they've got when their young kids have finally gone to sleep and they're so knackered. They know they're going to go to sleep, but they still want to play a game for half an hour. So accessibility to me is accessibility in the broadest sense of it. So engaging with other partners. Yeah. Well, we've got a lot of people that like talking to us from in the industry and outside the industry and, you know, we'll take calls and we'll see. You know, there might be an opportunity that comes along that we can go, yeah, that's something that makes sense. We'll we'll go along in that direction or it might be now is not for us. We're not looking at at that at the moment. There are number of acquisitions at the moment that might be interesting for us. We're just looking at them at the market, what we think is sensible. So, we're considering a number of options there, but um looking at intellectual property, we're looking at uh more movie productions. We're looking at there's a lot more games, tabletop gaming. I've got a book coming out of a a fiction fictional book called Lord of Blackthornne. It's the one behind me. That's the mockup cover. It's coming out later this year, which is quite exciting. It's a fantasy fantasy adventure book I've written and it's being published by Rebellion. So, we keep trying lots of different things. So yes, there could be. Is anybody going to try and buy us? I don't know. That's up to them. We would not be easy to buy because it would have to be something more than money. It would have to feel like it was getting involved in a bigger a bigger entity somehow. Then I look at how some big companies are run and think, yeah, I think I could run them better than they're being run at the moment. Um then maybe maybe I'm completely wrong. Don't it's a different Yeah. Well, there's an element I've obviously gone from a corporation to being independent and it's certainly a um I don't I'd go back and for Yeah, there there I mean just to just to interview you a little bit that that that's interesting because when you're working in a big corporate structure, you you have certain things that work in a certain way and when you go freelance it shifts and changes and you suddenly realize what you're missing and what you're gaining. And it's sometimes a bit of a bit of a tricky balance. Is that what you found? Yeah. Well, actually, you know, I I was uh there were definitely advantages to being part of a corporation. You know, you're looked after. You know what you've got. There's a stability there. You've surrounded by people. There's a lot more meetings. Um but uh it can be frustrating. I mean, I'm quite fortunate cuz I've not just come out into I've come out into a world and I've immediately got backer. So there was an element of I'm not sitting there worrying where my next, you know, am I going to am I going to be able to maintain the financial situation that I was a year ago. I I've immediately had that sorted from the start. So I've got this sort of quite fortunate position where um I'm independent but also um um um funded for a few years. Very good. That's very sensible. It's very fortunate. So I I don't know if I can speak for for everyone that's in the position, but I certainly enjoying making my own decisions and working to to to schedules that I set and doing things I think is important. And it's not that there's anything corporations doing anything wrong, but they've got different pressures, right? And they're often bigger organizations. They've got different priorities. Those priorities shift and change. You might be, you talked about some of the changes in the games industry where, you know, it's no fault of people's own. It's just that the company at the top has changed its strategy. And it's almost nobody's fault. It's sort of that's just the reality of the of the of the situation you're in. You can find yourself out in the cold or put in a corner or the things you were hoping were happening aren't going to happen because something else is on fire and needs looking after or something else is exciting and they're going to invest in that area instead. And it's nice to be able to be a bit more in control of what you're doing. And I guess, you know, I'm you must know that. And and and so I I'm basically exactly the same. I'm in a very fortunate position. I've got a structure around me that allows me to make big things, but I am ultimately it's Chris and me make the decisions for us. Yeah. Don't have anybody else making decisions. You we have advisers, sure, but at the end of the day, if we want to do something a bit crazy because it sounds like fun, then we'll agree that we do that. Yeah. And then it's our fault, you know, successful or not. When it's your own money as well, you're perhaps a little bit more, you know, you might go, I'm going to make a game set in the Lake District. Uh yeah, but let's do that in a responsible way. Well, there is that. Yeah, but I mean I think generally I've been the sort of person that controls budgets, doesn't want to overspend. I I I find you got to spend the right amount. Yeah, that does sometimes mean you got to spend more than you originally intended. You got to spend more time to make something work, but I don't think you should have a laya fair attitude to it. I don't think it should just be, hey, whatever. But we'll just spend more time and money for no good reason. Have to have a good reason to spend money. I'm conscious of the time. Uh Jayce, but I ask one final question. It's quite a general one. What's next then for Rebellion? We talked about what might happen if someone comes in and talks, but what is actually on your plan? Keep on making games. I mean, we're moving from a cross generation technology, you know, where it falls on seven different formats, which is difficult. the older formats are no longer financially viable. So, we're all moving to the to the new formats. There's new forms of hardware coming up. There are there seems to be quite a significant rise in the sort of handheld format which is intriguing and the way people play games on on kind of smaller, more personal screens, which is weird cuz also there's a rise in the enormous screen as well. So, it's like we've got these two extremes. Nobody's playing on a midsize screen anymore. They're either on a little screen or a effing massive screen. How do your user interfaces cope with that? Yes, we're obviously keeping on updating our technology, moves that forward. Um, working with hardware manufacturers in all sorts of different ways. So, that's exciting. There one of the uniquenesses of the company is it's our own tech. Yeah, we make everything. So, as a result of it being our own tech, we get approached by hardware manufacturers at the same sort of time that Epic or Unity do because they want us to be supporting their hardware, too. So, in a way, it's a little bit of a competitive advantage for us. If we were just using somebody else's engine, we wouldn't get to know some of the hardware future potential cuz a lot of it, some of it doesn't actually ever come out. Some of it comes out in a totally different form. So, that's always interesting. And then trying to grapple with discovery. How do we how do we get our games to be seen and played by more people? So we acquired a company called Blackshaw who are a kind of a YouTube agency management agency. Uh they're very interesting. They they deal with influencers and they help people. People come to them and say we want this big advertising campaign across multiple different influencers and they will handle all of that. And we felt that was something we needed to look into. We're talking to various streamers about linear content, about TV shows and movies, none of which are anywhere near being announced, but you know, it's always interesting to see what happens there. And that's an interesting industry cuz that's in turmoil at the moment and churning. So, basically, we want to make more good games. We'll continue to make more good games. We've now got the challenge of massive new success in Atom 4. What do we do in the future with Atom 4? Well, we're talking about we've got DLC coming up. We'll be talking about what do we do about sequels? Do we do spin-offs? Um, we've got more Sniper Elite we want to do. You know, there's there's all of our brands. We want to try and keep a balance between sequels and new original things as well. And how do you do that when you've got now three, if not four IPs? Yeah. We don't have the space in the studio with over 500 members of staff. How do we cope with that? So, lots of challenges, uh, lots of excitement. At the end of the day, we want to make content, good content that entertains people, and that keeps them coming back for more because if somebody buys one of our games or watches one of our videos, I want them to go, "That was worthwhile. I wonder what else they've got in their library that I can also play." Cuz that means you've kept them happy. Yeah. And you definitely have a style to your games. Well, I'm I'm very conscious of the time. I think that is all we have time for. But so, thank you, Jason, for joining us. My pleasure. That's it for today's game business show. To make sure you don't miss an episode or a big news story, visit www.thegamebusiness.com, which is the gamebus.com. I hope it's www.infings anymore. Um, uh, stick in your email there and you'll get an email every time we put out a new episode or break a story. Until next time, thank you for tuning in. What is the first thing you do when you go to work in the morning? Check my emails. Console or PC? PC. Greatest movie of all time? Difficult one. Conan the Barbarian. If you could lead any other video games company, uh, what would it be? That's an interesting one. Um, my goodness. I don't think I I don't I don't think I'd be any good at running anybody else's. They're too different. I'll stick with Babian. Is it? Uh, will Nintendo Switch 2 out sell Switch One? Probably. Yes. What one thing should game companies be thinking about but probably aren't? What matters to the player? Why should the player play their game? And why does the game make a difference to that player?