Ian Livingstone has told Edge-Online that he’s excited by the innovation he expects to spawn from titles such as LittleBigPlanet and Spore over the coming years, and that Eidos “has its own ideas in this area”.

“The most exciting thing about games is always seeing new ideas emerging,” he said. “What you"re seeing with Spore or LittleBigPlanet is a really interesting development where large publishers such as EA or Sony are basically providing a platform for gamers to start to create, and more importantly to share, content themselves - a step beyond XBLA or XNA, which still require pretty strong technical development skills.

“I believe this is a tremendous step forward in allowing gamers to really ‘own’ the game in a way that hasn"t been possible before and this is where I see some really exciting innovation coming from in the next few years.

“Of course,” he added, “Eidos has its own ideas in this area, although we"re not quite ready to talk about them just yet.”

Livingstone also praised Microsoft’s XBLA and XNA platforms for enabling developers to experiment and innovate in ways they wouldn’t be able to if working on big-budget titles.
 
“… The great thing about these services is that they allow real innovation. Big AAA titles are such complex projects that it"s difficult to introduce radical changes part-way through development, particularly once you"re past the prototyping stage.

“Developing downloadable games, or using tools aimed at small teams or individual developers, allows you to experiment with new forms of gameplay and to change things quite dramatically without incurring huge costs or causing knock-on effects to dozens of other people in the team. That all helps foster a really creative spirit within a team and frees you up to take greater creative risks than you could otherwise afford.”

We’ll have more from Livingstone on a revitalized Eidos, Tomb Raider: Underworld, the state of the UK games industry and the growing role of casual games in a soon to be published interview.