Frank Gibeau

Yeah, France and Germany are looking pretty good. The US has got sectors that are doing very well. I'm actually one of the optimists on that front - I don't think it's going to look like last Christmas at all. Last Christmas was horrific, frankly.

That's the worst part, not knowing. I think people can now see the bottom, or they're standing at the bottom, and it's about the climb back. So I'm optimistic that you'll see a very healthy Christmas for Electronic Arts, and into Q4.

I think that's fair, from the industry's point of view. I'm far more parochial about what we're doing - we're up about six or seven points in market share, and I don't really care that everybody else is down. I'm really pleased where we're at - and I think right now you're looking at tough comps, sure, with Metal Gear and GTA in that first quarter.

But also plastic's way down, so a lot of the music category stuff is not as robust as it's been, and it's unclear whether a lot of this peripheral activity that's happening is going to stick. USD 125, USD 115, USD 99 price points for these things - it appears to have gone soft right now in the market place.

But for standalone software titles that are high quality, from us? I feel good about it. I look at our first half, our Q2, I feel good about our company, our line-up. We're not as exposed to some of those other issues - year-on-year our Q4 is going to be very dramatic in terms of the titles released.

I think it's awesome. It's an old line, but it still rings true for us: "We make the ammunition for the hardware wars"'. So the lowest priced hardware possible is a good thing for us. We want to see as big and broad a base as possible, and the Sony hardware is a good piece of equipment.

Getting into that price point is just going to expand the market for us, especially in Europe. We have a lot of PS3 games, we're a good supporter of Sony, we believe in the platform. We've got a lot of PSP games coming, and frankly we also support the PlayStation Network with direct-to-consumer releases.

So we're strong, committed partners of Sony and I'm extremely excited about the Slim - I think it looks great. And the price point will be hot.

The good news is that we still have a lot of price points to go yet - Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony - which points to a longer cycle for hardware this time around. And again, for us it's great, because we don't have to go out and build a whole new set of engines for next-gen.

You've got really good proprietary engines, you've got Unreal, the CryEngine - a lot of really good middleware that will help keep this industry sustained all the way through 2012, 2013, maybe longer. People aren't dying for more HD - they're looking for peripherals, they're looking for online - which is all easy stuff to add to these platforms.

But you can't go beyond 1080p right now, that's the physical limit of the television, so there's no real reason for Sony or Microsoft to go there.

Oh, yes, we've actually built some tech demos in 3D for Need For Speed: Shift and Burn Out, and I think that Natal is going to be pretty clever. We've got some of the workstations in the office, we're screwing around with some different things. It's pretty liberating to be in a controller-less environment.

It'll be a different kind of game, it won't be some of the things you'd traditionally expect, but between Natal, price point moves and online I'm feeling very bullish that the cycle's going to be a lot longer.