Christian Svensson - Part One

I would say it is. Our global head of product development is adamant about expanding the number of Western developers that we're working with. I think you'll see the methods in which we're working with them change a little bit. We're actually going to be doing a tighter integration between our western operations and Japan's operations, so we'll have producers on both sides of the pacific assigned to pretty much every project, including things coming out of Japan.

So a bit more integration than we've had in the past - over the past three years or so we've had a Western product development organisation that was fairly standalone, a bit autonomous. I think we're heading towards more of a global team now.

Financial considerations for every developer is a legitimate concern. Developers need to expect a publisher to want to see what your books look like. If a developer can't carry a couple of milestones on their own, and a publisher doesn't approve a certain milestone, and the developer then says: "Well then we have to lay off these 15 guys and your USD 10 million investment that's already been made is at risk"... the publisher effectively can't say no.

The publisher has to continue to fund a project that hasn't been meeting its milestones, with the aim of saving the investment. So financial solvency of any development partner you work with is absolutely critical.

At the end of the day, when developers deliver what's in the statement report in the contracts that we sign with them, they get paid. If for some reason or another a discussion is opened as to whether a milestone should be approved or not, we need to know that the developers have the wherewithal to weather that, and get that milestone to the point where it can be approved.

We're pretty rigorous in how we evaluate our milestones, and we can only do that with partners who have the financial solvency to carry themselves a little bit. As far as GRiN themselves are concerned, [founders] Bo and Ulf [Andersson] were stellar to work with, and I'd daresay we'd not be averse to working with them again.

Without question. When my boss and I were brought in four years ago our remit was to grow Capcom in the West. It was pretty well understood that Japan, at best, was a flat market in terms of growth. Even if Capcom was successful and growing its market share in Japan, because the market isn't expanding quickly there, that's not going to be a huge growth area for us.

We were a much smaller percentage of the business in the West than we are today. Now, we are significantly higher. We have grown revenues in North America over the last four years by approximately 270 per cent. And it wasn't just that we had a good year last year and that's the 270... It was a consistent planned growth all along the way.

There are similar growth patterns for Europe as well - so, across the West, we are much larger as a percentage of the company than we were when we came in. That was the goal.

But we're still not quite where we need to be. If you look at the relative market sizes of Japan versus North America and Europe combined, globally they're about twenty-ish per cent of the global market but we're still not 80 per cent of Capcom's revenue base. The goal would be to get us more in-line with relative market size.

Part of that desire to work with Western developers was driven by creating Western focused content aimed at Western gamers. And that may mean leveraging the Capcom brand, as we did with Bionic Commando, as re-envisioned, re-imagined, by Western developers.