Guitar Hero's Michael Sportouch

I think, as you said, Guitar Hero has really transformed the games industry - but also the music industry. I think the challenge for us, because we have always been the leader - and we're still the clear leader in the category across the world, especially in Europe.

We're a solid leader and it's a challenge for us to continue to lead the category, and we want to continue to innovate both in hardware and software, because the beauty, but also the complexity, of the Guitar Hero business is to find the right mix of software innovation - we need to have great games, and what makes a success in our industry is a great gameplay experience that's fun for the consumer - and combining that with new hardware.

So if we continue to find the right mix between hardware and software innovation, and also getting new consumers into our brand and our franchises, then we'll continue to develop the music category in the US and Europe.

I think that original innovation was the foundation of the franchise, but this year we've got a new innovation that's the DJ Hero game, with a new peripheral and a new gameplay experience.

So there are what I would call major innovations, or foundation innovations - what we have this year with DJ Hero, what we had a couple of years ago with the first guitar - but it's also permanent innovation.

That's not always perceived as being as big as creating a new peripheral - it's more subtle, like when we created the Music Studio in Guitar Hero: World Tour. On Guitar Hero 5 now, the accessible gameplay, the Party Mode, the jump-in-jump-out - it's constant innovation, and what makes any big franchise successful is the combination of many different details.

I think what we're trying to achieve is to continue to make progress on the gameplay experience with the consumer, with let's say smaller innovation - but when you combine all of these things together... like on GH5 we're very proud of the game... it will probably be reviewed as the best Guitar Hero ever, and we'll get 91-92 per cent reviews.

But a lot of people, a lot of reviewers who are asking "What's new, what's next?" are saying that the set list is incredible, we have the best selection of artists, the largest selection of music, and great gameplay innovation - which is probably not as big as having new hardware, but it's a big step forward for the gameplay experience.

So the way we see innovation going forward is that we continue to improve the gameplay experience, the music experience. Because our game, we're a mix between a videogame and a music game, so we're on the frontier of the music industry, hardware and software.

It makes the whole mix extremely exciting, but also extremely challenging. I think this year we have a lot of software innovation in GH5 and Band Hero which will satisfy our current players, but also the new entrants to the genre.

Meanwhile we hope that the hardware innovation in DJ Hero will bring people who have never played Guitar Hero before into the franchise. We have electronic music, we have hip-hop, and a new very exciting piece of hardware - we set ourselves very high ambitions with DJ Hero, which again is a big challenge, but also very exciting.

If you look at what happened at E3, we won a lot of awards - not only for the game itself, but also for the hardware. We were nominated in the Best Hardware and Best Music Rhythm Game categories, which was very exciting - because it's a big change from what we're used to doing, and when we went into E3 we didn't know what the press and retail reactions would be.

But everyone was so excited about it, so now the next step is that we'll make the consumers excited - and we've already got a lot of buzz on the game.