By Lizzie Stabler – Brand Evangelist

Hosted by GamesIndustry International columnist and Eurogamer Editor, Johnny Minkley, last night saw a panel of eclectic games industry experts discussing the world of gaming at BAFTA HQ.

Games Question Time was a chance for members of the gaming industry and the public to ask some of the UK’s biggest names for their opinions about our ever-evolving industry.

The panel included Lionhead Studios founder Peter Molyneux OBE, now Creative Director of new startup, 22Cans. His opinions of in-game purchases in mobile games carried laughter into the audience, after recent news that his new game, Curiosity, will feature a £50,000 diamond chisel! Banter between him and Ian Livingstone, including Moylneux’s ability to over-hype games, was the highlight of the evening for everyone in the audience.

Molyneux expressed that whoever does buy the one-off diamond chisel will see something utterly amazing inside the centre of Curiosity’s mysterious cube. Livingstone joked, “we’ve heard that before!”

Ian Livingstone OBE, best known for co-founding the influential series, Fighting Fantasy, now Life President of Eidos and Vice Chairman of UKIE, made an insightful comment about the value of the gaming world.

“It’s predicted to be a $50billion industry by 2016″, says Livingtsone. There are currently over 100 million mobile gaming players in America and around 24 million in the UK. A market that is only increasing with the billions of handsets being sold around the world.

With the recent news from E3, there were both positive and negative comments about the latest developments in our industry, with some comments being particularly unenthusiastic towards Nintendo.

Minkley commented “Nintendo are becoming lost with their new Wii U controller, however we said that about the DS and that hit off.”

The idea of the tablet-based controller didn’t seem to have convinced the panel, but will we eat our words?

Former commissioner of Channel 4 Educational Games, Alice Taylor, felt “sorry for Nintendo.” She is now the founder of MakieLab, producing customisable, 3D printed game-enabled toys. Alice represents the small but slowly increasing number of women within the industry. Inevitably, the discussion of women in games was soon on topic.

Taylor comments, “there are many females working within marketing, but I would like to see more women involved in the development side of gaming.”

The final panel member Dave Bailey, co-founder of Mediatonic, admitted his company has a small percentage of females amongst his 40+ team, “but this will no doubt change in the future.”

Bailey added, “it’s becoming more cool to be a geek and girls will be more comfortable in taking their computer science skills into gaming”

Regardless of men or women producing the games, talent should be celebrated. Molyneux said a lot of talented developers fail to into “rockstar types” because they’re scared of speaking to the media.

“Developers seem to be incredibly scared of speaking to the press, even those with the most incredible talents.” Molyneux adds, “You need people who are confident and eloquent to deal with press.” Celebrity really does sell.

Credit goes to Johnny Minkley and GamesIndustry International for a successfully insightful and entertaining evening. The wine was pretty nice too.