Ben Feder - Part One

Well, look - we've always been focused on creating the most innovative and the most creative games in the industry, and we knew well ahead of the release that it would be a stunningly successful game. But even we were surprised by its success.

I don't know if I'd call it vindication - if it had gone the other way we'd have had some explaining to do - but we're thrilled with the success, and USD 500 million...it's unbelievable, and the party just keeps going on.

Frankly it's not just the financial success, it's the creative, the technology, the artistic success, so we're really proud. I've never been interested in vindication, but we lay out our strategy and execute - hopefully we make the right decisions, and in this case the results indicate the decision was the correct one.

Well let's take GTA as the first example. There are two things that offset each other, one is the initial launch was successful, and that would indicate a successful experience with respect to the downloadable content. That said, it's an experiment for us and the industry, so there's an element of unknown.

I believe that the audience that bought GTA - the core fans - in their hearts when the downloadable content becomes available, they'll be screaming to buy it. So I don't have any hesitation or concern that the downloadable content is going to sell below expectations. If anything it will sell above expectations.

I think the big question mark is what happens to hardware sales over Christmas, and what happens to GTA, because at some point GTA just saturates hardware - so the question is, can we get the hardware sales up over Christmas? Because it tends to be a seasonal business, more so than the software business - and what that does to the installed base, because the installed base is what we look at for downloadable content.

So that's GTA, and I think we'll look at GTA first, and learn from that experience.

I think there's a growing school of thought that broadband is going to impact the business, that broadband has already impacted the business in the Asian territories. So one way or another, broadband downloadable content is going to have an impact on the business and I think we're all learning and watching, and using the assets we can bring to bear to learn about it.

In our case, lesson number one is GTA IV.

Well we watch the platforms very closely, all the time. Microsoft's been a great partner, Sony's been a great partner, we're thrilled with both of them. There are elements of business dealings with them that we've inherited that of course we're going to stick with.

We do think that PS3 has accelerated its growth in recent months, in part because of Blu-ray but not entirely - the price cut helped too. And I think what's going to continue to drive hardware sales on all platforms is going to be some relief to the consumer, especially the American consumers that are under a little bit of pressure right now - those price cuts are going to help.

And as the installed base grows we will watch it as any third party would the installed base. We're a committed partner for Microsoft, we're a committed partner for Sony, we're a committed partner for Nintendo.

It's interesting, and I credit some of the magazines with respect to GTA, in the United States anyway, about setting the tone early on in the GTA discussion. It was almost never about the violence, the drunk-driving, the sort of things people thought the journals would focus on.

And it was such a "wow" experience for some of the journalists that initially wrote about it, but what set the tone, the parameters of the debate, was the art, the technology, the experience, all of that - and the controversy was almost second to that.

Now, it's possible that the controversy is yet to come, and that every passing day is kind of less risk, but the tone of the conversations has change, the parameters of the debate have changed completely. All of that noise seems to be behind us. I couldn't be more happy - and let me make clear, we encourage all of our developments teams to push the creative envelope - and the technology envelope as well - and create an experience that will amaze and wow the audience.

And the technology is at a point where you don't have to shock the audience to amaze the audience, and I think people have experienced that with GTA, and will continue to experience that with our games.

It's never our intention to shock the audience, but we're now at a point where we can amaze the audience with storyline, with character development, with elements of entertainment that have previously been impossible. So you're seeing that now, and the social debate around that has changed. It hasn't gone away completely, we definitely have our critics, we have legislation all over the place that we think threatens the creative freedom and the environment in which gamers need to develop.

You can't develop in an environment of fear and intimidation and we at Take-Two have done everything we possibly can to create an environment - not just for our own studios but for the industry - of creative freedom, freedom of expression, and let the users decide.

I think we've moved the debate from "Okay, it's not a game, it's interactive entertainment," and it's not for kids. It's not for kids. And we can accept that. And then we can take the debate beyond that, and talk about creativity, and talk about this amazing medium.

I come from the entertainment business originally, and to me this is Hollywood from the 1950's. There's so much creativity going on that doesn't exist in Hollywood any more. There's so much creativity because of what you can do with the technology and what you can do with the audience.

I remember when Mortal Kombat came out and there was this whole hoo-ha because the blood was red. You look back at that and you laugh, and I think we'll look back at these days and ask what the big deal was.

Games don't kill people. People don't go out on rampages because they played a game, they went out on a rampage because they went out on a rampage, and if they have guns, then look at the gun control laws. But to blame violence on videogames is patently absurd.