Interview: Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack

We talk Silicon Knights' founder and president to get his latest views on the games industry, as well as the lowdown on Too Human, which is finally released later this month.

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Dyack: Well I think there are negatives and positives to everything. I am talking purely from an economic and market point of view. I'm not in favour of anyone "winning"; I am basing a lot of the things I am saying off of research into commoditisation and something that's called performance oversupply, which is economics. Putting a timeline on that, actually quite frankly, it's shocking to me that there have been proprietary models in the games industry for this long. Usually it only takes about ten years. This has been an extremely long period of time to have closed formats for this type of technology. I don't know when it's going to end, I just think that it will.

Kikizo: It's interesting, when you think about the future of gaming in that scenario, your mind can wander for hours about how that reality would be, and what it would mean.

Dyack: We are so used to the consoles right now, it would be hard to think what it would be like without them. But the interesting thing about commoditisation, you have to think about it this way: the more features they put into the system technology-wise, is inversely proportional to its value. It's like a cell phone - the more features you get, the less it's worth. Same with these consoles - and they're putting more and more in all the time - there are still religious console wars about which console's better, but the difference is getting very, very questionable now, it's getting more and more questionable as we go.

But I look at it from a developer model: if we are going to try and make money as an industry, and a publisher has to make a bet on which console they are going to choose, it's getting tough right now. And the economics are going to flush out where people are just going to go with the easiest money making model possible. And I think that's what commoditisation does to the market for us, so that's what I think is going to do it.

Kikizo: I know you have said that the intention is for the Too Human trilogy to appear on Xbox 360, but we have to be realistic here: this first game has been in development for a long time, and numerous Microsoft execs have now said that they're already working on a new machine.

Dyack: That's not a surprise, actually it's not unheard of that next generation systems are worked on five years in advance from when they're actually launched, so that's not necessarily an indication of when the system's coming out - I know hardware manufacturers sometimes put five to seven to ten years' research and development into the console. So that really doesn't mean anything. What means something is when they're going to launch the next console, and that often is more an economic decision than it is a technology decision.

Kikizo: So from a developer point of view, you're not having to plan that far in advance?

Dyack: Oh I think it's very possible that Too Human can come out [entirely] on the 360. If Microsoft announces the console next year, that would be very challenging then. But I don't think that's the case, I can't predict what Microsoft's going to do, it's their decision. But I think it's reasonable at this point. And the engine is built to be scalable as well, so even if another platform does come out, we're not very worried about it - the whole idea of this engine is it's specifically built to run on consoles. It doesn't run on PCs - well, it can run on PCs, but it's a velvet platform designed for consoles.

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