Codemasters' Rod Cousens Part 2

Pre-owned or piracy... don't forget it was out on PC too - and I got an email from a competitor saying that they knew of at least 600,000 illegal downloads of the game. It's an impossible question to answer.

Well, go back to the macro-economic question. If you want to access the emerging markets, you've got to be on PC. You're not going to sell many PS3 games in India or China, so I don't think we can shy away from it - but I think how we deliver it probably needs a rethink.

I've spoken on panels about retail, and everyone's looking for confrontation - I have no problem being confrontational, but going back to your previous question about retail, the reality is that the business model needs to change. It's not inconceivable to say that we send out a Formula One game that's not complete - maybe it's got six tracks... I could never get away with that with FOM, but as an example...

Then they have to buy their next track, and you follow it around the world. When you turn up in Abu Dhabi you have to pay for the circuit, and whatever the changes are to the cars that are put through. That, I think, would deal with a lot of it, and also address the pre-owned.

Pre-owned isn't actually new - in 1981 there was Buy and Try, and that type of stuff. The difference was that it wasn't a significant percentage of the market, and it was never promoted as aggressively through the retail community as it is today.

You could argue for the retailer in that context, but also what it's done is kill things like subsequent exploitation in platinum and classics... and it expands the potential for piracy by default. They would argue that prices would suggest otherwise - I would say not, because by the time you get down through the food chain, a thing gets more and more ripped off.

So my view is that it needs to be managed. I don't believe that retail is going to disappear soon - I also believe that 35 per cent of the world market that doesn't have broadband, and its only access it through retail, is still a significant part to any content creator.

What we have to figure out is how we're going to work together to make this happen. If retail takes a confrontational point of view and says that if we go online, they won't stock the box - and publishers then say that all they're going to do is put out DLC after launch that retail can't participate in... it's ridiculous.

Actually, you need them to get to the stage where they stock the box. It's not inconceivable that you're going to ask them to give the box away at some point in time. But then, they participate to an extent in the subsequent DLC exploitation.

How does that happen? Maybe it is through a code, or whatever - but it's stuff like that which I believe between us all we'll figure out. The music industry is dead, right? Well, not that I look at, it's bigger than it's ever been, it's just changed its shape.

I think we all have a place. I don't think they go away. What period of time are we talking about, 5 years or 25 years? If we're talking about five years, the hardware platforms still need to get sold out there. I can talk about the concept of the cloud - I can buy into that - but commercially within the next five years, there's a big question mark.

So we are where we are, and at the end of the day, if I'm a hardware vendor I need my boxes out there, and my only avenue for that is through retail. Maybe they should give larger discounts on the hardware and smaller discounts on the software, and the model needs to change - and we all figure it out? That's what I mean - I think we all need each other, at least for the next five years, and maybe longer.

Yes - the way it's structured today is destructive, and it's negative to creativity and innovation. I believe it has to be managed - there's an element of it which is acceptable, and there's an element that isn't.

If the content creators could participate in the secondary or subsequent exploitation, I think that's fair game. I think equally the retailer then has an argument that he should participate in some of the DLC, which they ordinarily wouldn't. By default, you manage the process.

What I don't buy off on is that retailers are responding to pre-owned because that's what consumer traffic tells them. As I said earlier, if you put the price at zero, you'll get even more traffic, but where does that go? It's nonsensical, and what is it taking out elsewhere?

The figures put out by retailers are on the aggregate of their total revenue, but what is it on a specific software format? Then you'll see its significance. If the response of specialist stores to the growth of supermarket is to deal with it in this way, they're going to lose.

When you've got Sainsbury's putting a game out at £25... I can take from that the retailer is telling us it doesn't need any margin.

I think we all need to sit around a table and see how we're going to manage it. Can you imagine the online infrastructure requirement in supermarkets beyond local baked beans and so on that they'd have to create to support it?

So actually it could be the value added for the specialists.