A Fresh Start - Part Two

The priority of buying another company has gone down the list quite a lot - of course, if there's a good opportunity we may go for it, but it's a lower priority.

The reason I say that is because we already have a number of presences across the world, and I intend to utilise those bases. I look at those bases as windows to the market, and with this recent acquisition we've opened up so many windows in the world market. Those are the places we can absorb all the good talent, create new product, and then sell to the world market.

So in that sense I'd say we've already created the right platform to do that.

It's almost impossible to create that kind of a platform overnight, so strategically it was very important to join hands with Eidos. At the moment my priority is to focus on how we can cultivate this platform further to generate revenue and profits together with Eidos.

If there were to be any future acquisition of properties it would probably be in another region, like India or somewhere in Asia, but at the moment I'm not really thinking about it.

From the developer side, the Japanese games industry became so successful that we didn't recruit new people. So today, if you look at the main creators of games, they're already in their late thirties.

When you look at the industry in the US, the industry has attracted some very talented people from, say, computer science and the film industries - so people from different sectors came into the industry and that kept the market vital, succeeding in creating new products.

But in Japan the old people are doing the same old job - and even the so-called new people... there are some people that you'd call 'game geeks' but it was a very closed world.

I'm the chairman of the industry association in Japan, CESA, and in that role I intend to do two things. One is to promote more international exchange, and then to promote exchange with different industries - such as TV and film.

But with the acquisition of Eidos we're now able to do both of those within one business entity.

Yes, that's precisely what I'm thinking of doing - but that's just my policy, because if I were to tell the existing staff to do that it means their workload would double, and they'd just run away... So of course I'll have the proper staff in place and then try to improve the merchandising output.

If you have the merchandising capability, as well as strong characters - which we do - then there's no way we shouldn't use it to generate profit.