EA's Jens Uwe Intat

What we always see with Nintendo is a big pick-up in hardware sales when they launch a new piece of Nintendo software that comes with it - which is usually the combination of, from a consumer point of view, getting an interesting piece of software, which is the reason why people buy consoles at the end of the day... not just for having a piece of plastic at home.

And secondly usually people get a very good deal with that game being bundled with a console - so whenever Nintendo launches a new game they see the hardware sales jump.

This year, compared to last year, we've seen far fewer strong new releases - which is one of the reasons why I think Nintendo hasn't been as strong in this calendar year.

They are, however, still number two in terms of the software market in Europe - so I think that's certainly not a really bad position to be in.

I think you're correct that Sony and Microsoft are more active in that space, and it's a chicken and egg question in terms of which is responsible for what... but one of the key explanations is that if you take Nintendo's market share on their own platforms and compare it to the numbers for Sony or Microsoft, you'll see that Nintendo has 40, 50 or even sometimes 60 per cent, in some countries.

For Sony and Microsoft it's usually between 10 and 15 per cent, again, maybe as much as 20 per cent in some countries during some periods when they're launching strong titles. So there's certainly much more third party activity going on for Sony and Microsoft platforms.

As to the question on whether Nintendo should do more marketing - frankly speaking, whenever we do have an interesting title that isn't directly competing with a Nintendo title they are actually open to co-operation.

I think in the past they've just been benefiting from the fact that their own software has been very strong, and that when they're promoting their titles they're also at the same time promoting their hardware - which just makes the overall marketing activities, from a financial perspective, much more efficient than for third parties promoting their titles on the Nintendo platforms.

What we are actually going to do is certainly continue to work with EA Sports Active on the Wii, and we'll also try to extend that to the other two platforms in order to broaden our activity in that space.

How we will work on that specifically, and what type of software and for what type of hardware, we'll announce in the future.