Corre Gamer

It is more difficult now. To launch a new IP you have to invest much, much more marketing to establish it, and if you add up the huge costs of development plus the investment in marketing you cannot be 100 per cent sure the target audience you'd expect, which is needed for the comeback on the investment. Especially in this part of the cycle of the consoles, we are cautious now to introduce new brands. We'll concentrate on the ones we have and make sure we bring them to the next level in terms of quality. We are still releasing some new franchises, RUSE is one, but it's a niche so we know the size of the market for real-time strategy games. We think with RUSE what we've invested so far we'll be able to find the right consumers and be profitable.

With niche games it's possible to have a hit more than in the triple-A space, especially in the fourth and fifth year of the console cycle. We would expect franchises to be established now.

If you come with the right proposition and right gameplay with this audience, you can capture their attention and after they will stay with you forever.

I think so. That's always been the case in the past because it's a fresh approach. The new technology always brings new ideas for gameplay or innovation and you can use this to introduce a new IP that will be attached to the hardware. And the market is usually less crowded in the first 18 months of a new machine, so then you can try something new. Right now there are so many huge IPs already known that it's very competitive.

We have been happy with our last releases on PSP. Assassin's Creed did very well, Avatar did very well, Prince of Persia is doing good. It's true that the volumes of sales are not huge but still we are making a living on that. We also re-released our key games and franchises on the Essentials range, and that's going good. All in all we are making some good business on the PSP.

3DS is something we believe in a lot. We have a lot of games coming for the launch of the machine, at least half a dozen for it, and we've been working on them for a long time. The technology they are bringing to the market is very innovative, very fresh and it can be a monster success because its bringing something new to the market. And then we can develop something new in terms of gameplay. Nintendo is very smart in the handheld market. They surprised us even in the end, even though we had a lot of information and were able to get ahead in the development of our games, they still surprised us each time they bring a new feature that we didn't know about. We're very confident that the machine will lift the handheld market, which is what we need. And we're ready.

Nintendo understands that it has lost so much money with piracy on the current DS that it is working on something to prevent that on future hardware. On the DS it was really the very first time that Nintendo software was pirated, so it took us all by surprise very quickly. The new hardware will be less easy to exploit and copy. In the last 24 months the market for DS has collapsed for software but people are still buying the hardware.

Yes, we are exploring that right now. Soon we will become known as the dance company because with Just Dance 2 the pre-orders are huge, Just Dance and Dance on Broadway are doing very well in the UK and with the Michael Jackson game coming we're going to become specialists [laughs]. Michael Jackson has been the biggest star ever in music and being able to work with his songs has been something we're very proud to be involved in. People were wondering what the game would be and how we would transfer Michael Jackson's music and movement into a videogame, but we're winning them over and the pre-orders are growing very strong.