But is this, in fact, an inevitable consequence of the industry's growth in size? Is it possible to become such a high-value business and retain the quirks and twists that actually made the whole thing catch on in the first place? For a general perspective on this broadest of questions, I picked out the Managing Director of a company that's seen perhaps the biggest growth in any aspect of the industry over the last decade or so, Future Publishing. From the garden-shed operation that launched Amstrad Action to today's vast, 800-employee subsidiary of bona fide global corporate behemoths like Pearson and now Apax, nobody seemed better qualified to examine, in a general sense, the ethics involved in the games business' shift in focus from the total creative freedom of the lone bedroom programmer to the ultra-narrow horizons enforced by accountants and marketing departments than Greg Ingham.

CTW: The conventional wisdom of the games industry at the moment seems to be firmly along the lines of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Much lip service is paid to old-fashioned concepts like originality, innovation and so on, but when it all comes down to it, all we ever seem to get is more of the same. How do you reconcile the inherent desire to do "good" things with the demands made of a senior exec in a global business concern, charged with the responsibility to maximise the bottom line in pretty much any way humanly possible?

GI: That's a false assumption about maximising profits in any conceivable way. In business, you have to do a barrowload of things of which profits, maybe, are the way of keeping a score, of determining whether or not the business is on track. But there's an awful lot more activity which is inherent in that, to actually get to that stage. Part of that is morale, it's motivation, it's momentum, it's opportunity... if you simply concentrate on profits, I don't think you have a business for very long.

CTW: Surely all those things are, ultimately, just ways to generate profit? If you have happy staff, they'll work harder, they'll work until 3am, they'll make you more profit.

GI: There's a whole bunch of reasons for doing what we all do, and speaking certainly for myself and the senior management here, money can never ever be the sole determinant. You can always improve the bottom line, you can always whack in 60-watt lightbulbs instead of 100-watt ones and go "Hurrah! We've saved a load of money", but you're in this industry for a bunch of things. Part of it is fun, genuinely - without that, I think you haven't got the start point of a successful business - part of it is the sheer excitement of getting new issues back or finishing games, of innovation and risk-taking, the primacy of people having a vision and you trying to back them with your structures, people, money and so on, and then to see it come through.

CTW: What I'm trying to get at, though, is the division between that, what you and the other directors might personally be trying to achieve, and the state that I'd say Future, and the games business as a whole, is in now, which is that it's much more of a corporate animal. Once a company reaches a certain size, the company doesn't do things because of what the people in it want to do - to me, the whole point of a large, capitalist company is that it completely divides its corporate goals from its personal goals. It becomes a kind of self-serving entity.

GI: Maybe. I don't buy that at all, to be honest. It seems to me that one fuses into the other - if you don't have your personal desires fused into some sense of a business plan, then you're not happy as a person, and you then won't achieve. The idea that everything you do is subordinated to profit... you can talk in this abstract sense about "the corporation", but actually it comes down to a bunch of people with brains and flesh and blood and bodily forms, who take decisions. Those decisions are influenced by a whole barrowload of concerns, including profit and growth and everything, but money can never, ever be the sole determinant. And that may be idealistic, it may be naive, but it's true.

CTW: I find it odd to hear you describe yourself as "naive"...

GI: I wouldn't at all wish to give the impression that this is a perfect world state, because it's not, you're always going to have to make compromises , but you do what you can to make it good, enjoyable, AND successful, and the two are not out of step. That's why so many people were trying to buy the company last spring - because they realised how valuable the culture is. It's something that I think is shared by a lot of companies in the computing business - hardly anyone in CTW's readership works for a company that existed before the 1980s, so when you start one up, you've got a chance to create the world as you would wish it, you're not hampered by the ossification, the structure and the tradition... you can say "Hey, we can do anything we want to here".

CTW: The games business is worth, now, exponentially more than it was as little as 10 years ago. Partly, that's due to the Playstation bringing in more of the mass market than has ever been involved before. Does that combination of factors make it completely inevitable that the whole games business is going to become more conservative, more aimed at the lowest common denominator?

GI: You could make a precisely opposite argument, though, which is that as something grows, it provides opportunities for narrowcasting. I don't profess to be any kind of expert on the actual games-publishing side of things, but as far as magazines go, there are already God knows how many Playstation titles - 12 or 15 or whatever - but if the Playstation continues its dominance, then perhaps there will be horizontal opportunities for different kinds of magazine, for "Sports Playstation" or "Beat-'Em-Ups Playstation" or whatever else. You could just as strongly say that the increased size of the market provides for more opportunities. We've already seen it happen in previous markets, or the PC one today, where you have the broadcast, umbrella magazines like PC Format or Amiga Format, but there's still a demand for the narrower, more dedicated, hardcore titles like PC Gamer or Amiga Power or PC Answers or whatever.

CTW: But what I'm suggesting is that because of the seemingly limited tastes of the mass market, there just isn't the scope, or the diversity of interest for there to be these niches.

GI: Really? You could argue that, taking football on television as an example, the opposite is true. I saw something the other night that was Third Division games from last season being re-shown in the middle of the night, or you've got Football Italia on Channel 4, addressing a very narrowcast area. Despite the World Cup being the great, all-encompassing thing, there are also the opportunities for niche markets. I'd say the same process applies to the games business. I don't see that they're fundamentally inimical. Yes, bigger CAN mean blander, but it can also mean an umbrella under which you can shelter various niches. Loved by a few or liked by a lot, that's the eternal choice.

CTW: Wouldn't you say that the prevailing direction, though, supports the opposite belief? The charts are the same every week, perpetually dominated by football games, racers and Quake clones. And as far as mags are concerned, the multi-format, broad church side of things has been moribund for years, but it's suddenly burst into life with two major new monthlies imminent and another attempt at that elusive object, the successful weekly (or, in this case, fortnightly). The market appears to be converging rather than diverging.

GI: Well, again, I don't really want to speak for games companies, but we're publishing more titles than we were before, and I think they're more differentiated than they were before.

CTW: Are they, though? For all the numbers of titles, I don't really see anything that's new or different.

GI: Well, for reasons that have been paraded a little bit in CTW recently, we're being fairly guarded at this stage about the launch of the new multi-format. But I think when that magazine emerges, people are going to be truly stunned. It's very innovative, distinctive, very different, and - I'm very confident - extremely successful magazine. But there's some other stuff - I'm not even going to give you a hint - some other stuff that we're looking at in the computer games industry that just hasn't been done previously.

CTW: You can't say something like that and then not even give us a hint.

GI: Yes I can. I just did.

CTW: So these radical new ideas, they're -

GI: I didn't say "radical".

CTW: Do you see them as a reflection of something that's existing in the games business already, then, or as an attempt to actually create some new niche in the market?

GI: We're not in the business of vanity publishing. You can't be completely self-serving, completely up your own arse - you have to ally it to a commercial reality.

CTW: ...which sort of brings me right back to the corporate conservatism theme.

GI: Bigger may well be worse, culturally. You have to be very careful as you get big, because there's a real danger danger of blandification.But if you can get something that's yet bigger and yet more successful, and people actually like it /more/, then my God that feels good. But you have to work at it.