Jack Sorenson: Part One

The reason I think the slate we have this year is the best ever at THQ is mainly because it's finally fulfilling all the promise that we had of getting into lots of different genres, on next-gen, top quality. And then on the Wii side, to be able to do more that's unique to the Wii, innovative, trying to take advantage of the platform.

I think we've been very public about certain titles underperforming that we'd had higher hopes for. I look at a lot of that as just the entertainment industry. You try and do something, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, it's not necessarily a major crisis. Obviously in a public company those things have an outsized importance.

I certainly think something like Stuntman is a very competitive game for its time, and maybe just got lost in the competition. As we said before, too, we also had a high competitive issue on the Pixar stuff, from Cars being enormous and... Ratatouille's actually still performing quite well, but nothing at that level. Those had an impact on our financials.

But otherwise, as you said, we still had good success on WWE, and just came out with Frontlines, and a lot of the rest of our kids stuff has done fine. We're certainly happy looking forward to a lot of the titles we're showing out here.

What I would say about driving in general is, we were pretty disappointed on the performance of those games. But when you look at the entire year, racing across the board is way down. Every major franchise is way down.

Our feeling right now is, driving, or any kind of vehicle, is still relevant, but clearly it needs innovation. So when we're looking at future driving-action as a broader genre, unless we can bring innovation to it, we probably shouldn't do that. Which is one of the reasons why we left those brands behind, because it would be better to have a new brand signify where we think something's going.

We have some ideas, some things that are underway, but we obviously can't talk about, but I think industry-wide everyone is looking at how do they bring the driving genre back. Outside of Gran Turismo and Forza, first-party titles, it is a pretty difficult genre right now.

Obviously I can't talk about things in the future, but clearly they have an expertise in vehicles, so that's certainly something we'd be looking at.

That's a good question; I don't know what we've necessarily announced. We still have a couple of things coming and very targeted, something like Wall-E. The PS2 is rapidly declining even on a worldwide basis, but we clearly will support it on some big franchises where we know it works. And obviously you hate to leave that audience behind, just because they don't have the cash to go and buy the next system.

Obviously when we're in the business, it's never a good idea to talk about who's winning and who's losing. I actually think it's totally irrelevant. Even in the history of the business, other than something like the Dreamcast, you can do decent business on lots of platforms. So the issue is not who wins, it's can an independent publisher do a good business on that platform. We're thinking everything from high-end MMO all the way to cell phones.

There's a ubiquity of gaming out there, and the platform is really just a medium and if that makes sense – PS2 next year for something, PS2 two years from now – we certainly probably carried on longer on the GBA than most people and had a very nice business out there because, gee, there's 80, 90 million GBAs out there, maybe a bunch left in closets and drawers, but there's still enough audience to buy them.

I think there's almost too much of an emphasis on the sports aspect of who's winning and losing, when in fact all these platforms kinda win.

I have to be careful here because I grew up in the PC business, and probably want it as much as anyone to succeed. I would have to say I've probably been more negative in this past year than I have been in my whole career, because something is going on out there in the PC space. Whether it really is all about piracy, or it just becomes the domination of consoles, or as I go back and use that term, the ubiquity of gaming: there's a way to get gaming so many ways now that thinking about the PC as a disc-based platform may in fact be old.

A lot of what we're looking at is the PC as a delivery mechanism because it's connected to the Internet. Maybe disc-based software is on a permanent decline, maybe to a certain level where it won't go down anymore, but that digitial download, MMO, free-to-play, all of this stuff is coming through the PC. Certainly, casual gaming is all through the PC. All of those business models just don't go through retail, so when you look at retail figures on a comparison, it looks radically worse than in fact it may be. Maybe the PC is just transforming to really being the other end of the Internet.

I would just say I think that's already happened. You can look at the numbers and clearly there's a downward trend. We still think there's a market there, it's just where it's at. And then I think you have to augment the boxed product with digital download. A good example of what we're doing is with our Company of Heroes product in China. We've radically redesigned it as a free-to-play game. It's hard as a Westerner to get your head around it, but it's quite a fascinating way to structure a game and a business model. I don't know whether it will work here, but there is no other market in Asia.

If you think about it, if there's 100m people playing online games in China and Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, where there's not a single boxed product being sold, how bad is the PC?

On a global basis it may have seen the biggest growth of all platforms, but we're so western-centric that we just don't think of it that way.