BBC: Well be catalyst for growth

The BBC believes it can revolutionise the games market with Doctor Who: The Adventure Games.

The third-person action PC title is a downloadable free-to-play episodic adventure.

But the broadcaster doesn’t believe that giving the game away for free will hurt the games sector, and instead could bring about change for how digital titles are distributed.

We want to be a catalyst for the market,” said BBC Multiplatform’s head of fiction and entertainment commissions Victoria Jaye.

The role of the BBC in this space is to deliver compelling drama and entertainment – but that has to have a distinctive public service to it. We’ll be focusing on this in some areas and we’ll let the market provide for others – it’s not our intention to impact on the market in a negative way.”

Jaye added that the Doctor Who games were a key step in growing the company’s presence in the market, as well as being proof of how crucial games are as entertainment evolves in the digital space.

Games are integral to growing digital properties,” she said. If you are looking at developing digital stories, potentially many of them will be of a gaming nature, and we’ll continue looking at this space.

We have the right formats, some great stories and we’re continually growing our talent base, so now we’re looking at how we can partner with the games industry to come up with something very special that feels distinctively BBC.”