David Cage: Not Sure If FPSs Make Business Sense

Quantic Dream's David Cage makes games (such as Heavy Rain and now Beyond: Two Souls) that demand more than simply mastering physical actions or cheating with mods. He's occasionally mocked for seeming to slip into pretensions of art over entertainment. But it's possible that in 10 years time, he'll be seen as one of the saviours of an industry that is in a deadening spiral.

For example, he's just told GI.biz the kind of facts that will be guffawed at in accounts departments in all major publishers.

"How many first person shooters can we create per year? How many can we play per year? How many of them will be successful? Even from a business point of view, does it make any sense? I'm not sure."

Nor are we any more. But Cage is happy to plough his own furrow, stating:

"It's not up to me to tell the industry what they should or should not do. There are very clever people out there and they know what they want to do. I can only talk for my studio. I wouldn't be interested in making just software to sell to people at Christmas."

Ouch! But go on, "I'm not that kind of person and I'm not interested in that. I respect people doing this, but it's not how I see my work. I'm interested in using this medium to express something and to trigger deeper emotions. I think you can do it if you make movies, if you make TV series... all expression forms are great for that. But games, we just shoot and jump. What about trying something else and using it?

It's a fantastic medium. It's crazy what you can do with this thing, because the relationship you have with experience is so different from what you have with anything else. You watch a movie, you're just passive. You watch a story, and it's a story that's told to you. But when you're in a game, you can tell the story. You can decide what you want to happen. And you can make up pretty much your own story based on your choices and your moral decisions. That's fascinating."

And so it is.