Another big talking point at the moment is loot boxes, considering their inclusion in Shadow of War and Battlefront II.

Oh, yeah.

I can see that they’re a way to help cover development costs down the track. Is that the philosophy behind their inclusion in PUBG?

Exactly. We have to think about this as we want to run it as a service for five, 10, 20 years and we need a sustainable income source, and I’ve always believed having a strong skin economy, it’s a cosmetic economy, there’s no pay-to-win element to it. Again, it’s an optional thing. You get these boxes by playing the game, and you can choose whether to open them, or you can even sell them on the Steam Marketplace.

In my opinion, having that kind of economy where it’s cosmetics only, you have this skin economy that supports the game and it also supports the player base, because players are able to sell some of the skins for, even the PlayerUnknown set is going for $1,000. A guy tweeted at me saying he bought a whole HTC Vive VR set off a skin he got for essentially $20, and that’s what I think is a really good thing about, especially the CS: GO model: that it rewards players for playing the game and being committed to playing the game. Yeah, you can’t get all of the skins you want, but most of the skins are available on the Steam Marketplace for probably less than a dollar or five dollars. There are some of the higher-level ones that are, of course, you’re not able to afford or you may think are really stupidly high prices, but that’s just the economy. It’s fashion, I guess.

I think it’s very important for us to have this because it will support the game and, again, it’s an optional thing. We’re not trying to say you have to do this in order to be successful playing the game. If you’re a bit vain and you want your character to look cool, you may want to do this. Other than that, we see it as a model that can support as long, again, as it’s cosmetic only.

I just wanted to emphasise that point. There are no plans for it to ever be gameplay-impacting items in those crates, right?

Oh, no. Not at all. We want this to be a successful esport; that’s my dream since DayZ Battle Royale in Arma 2. You can’t have pay-to-win items. It has to be purely cosmetic, and that’s what our plan is, and it’s purely cosmetic.