Arkane's Romuald Capron

I think the definition of "core" has become more and more blurry, because what we called core twenty years ago is no longer what we can call the core gamer of today - they've evolved. From my experience people can jump, they can have different profiles - they can be core and casual at the same time.

The recent examples of BioShock, or Fallout - five years ago they could have been considered very hardcore games, but now you see they can sell millions of games, and touch a lot of people. I think the market is changing and the lines between different sections of games and becoming blurred.

I don't know the figures exactly, but I'm not especially worried that core gamers will disappear, or decrease. I would say the opposite, by the way - I think people playing on Facebook will also play on Fallout, or Mass Effect, because the game culture from previous generations means that people will bond with videogames.

That wasn't the case twenty years ago - they can switch very quickly from one genre to another, and I think the consoles have helped a lot, because the PC was another barrier, more technical, more for the geeks and so on. But now you can play games on your TV, so I think it's a good thing.

I wouldn't have said that five or ten years ago - back then we were very PC-orientated, and we were thinking that consoles, the Xbox and PlayStation 2, were casual. But then we saw BioShock, and it was just a miracle - we saw that there was room for core games on console.

I've got great hopes that this part of the market will still increase with more people coming from other genres, trying these kinds of games.

Yes, I think so. What I also see is that we have more and more adult-oriented games, with deeper stories and more interesting characters. Studios are looking to provide more emotion in games, which is an area we can still grow in.

There are so many things to do in that area - and the AI, for instance. I think games in their twenties, thirties and even forties are still looking for these kinds of games, and there aren't so many. Those are the kinds of games we'll try to make - so I'm quite optimistic on that.

My first piece of advice would be to try and follow your passion. That's what we've done in Arkane - our company is really driven by game design, and the genre of games we wanted to make. We had a lot of challenges in the past ten years, but I can say that our patience saved us.

All the decisions we took were based on what kind of games we wanted to make, and we refused some games - even when cashflow was tough. But at the end of the day we became known as a studio with passion and expertise with certain kinds of games - and that's why Bethesda wanted to work with us.

It's also important to be in a market that's working, of course - but besides that try to remember what you like to play, and where your passion lies. After all, we're creating entertainment products, so it's really difficult to be distant about our products.

If we had to start again from scratch right now, I'd probably say we would keep on working on the most technical consoles - the 360 and PS3 - because of the kind of games we're doing, which are first-person, immersive games. Of course, we could make something for the iPhone, or the 3DS - but for us the most immersive experience you can have now is on a PC, 360 or PS3.