Jon Rooke & Adam Roberts: Part One

It's very, very strong. The turn out [at The Gathering, the THQ retail showcase] has been amazing - the whole of the UK account base has turned up to see what's effectively an extension of E3.

Going round the stand at E3, people have about a minute and half to look at each individual titles, once you've pulled out Homefront and Red Faction, so today has given people the opportunity to delve deeper into some of the brands that they might not have even seen at E3 - and realise what the opportunities are.

We've got a little bit of time now to work with UK retail to prepare for calendar Q4, and that process is well underway.

To me Christmas is the key selling period in the year, but I think calendar Q1 is the right place to be launching new IP. Effectively Homefront is a new IP, and we're very confident that Red Faction fits happily in there as well.

Plus we've got plenty to be talking about calendar Q4 as well.

I don't think we necessarily have our titles in that early calendar 2011 period because we don't want to release them at Christmas, and we're worried about what's going to happen with Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and so on. I think that's what happened last year - a lot of people moved away... almost the whole industry moved away.

I actually think that Ubisoft showed that you can have great sales against a big competitor like that with Assassin's Creed. They did some fantastic volumes, and even the likes of Codemasters with Operation Flashpoint - they came in with a directly competitive title and actually did very good sales, a very good mindshare.

So I wouldn't say we've moved titles like Homefront and Red Faction to avoid being in that period - it's more that we know the games are going to be the quality we want them to be to release them into the market.

We have, in fiscal years gone by, brought games to market to try and hit a fiscal period - with sometimes an end result that we haven't delivered the quality that we expected internally, and also our consumers expected externally.

At THQ we will no longer do that - we will no longer ship a product until it's ready. Danny [Bilson]'s very clear on that, and if Homefront isn't ready in February, then it won't be released in February. It'll come out when it's ready - when it's competitive within the genre from a single-player point of view, and when we have a best-in-class multi-player element as well. When we have that triple-A gameplay quality.

Similarly with Red Faction, and the other core titles there as well - I don't think the market or the consumer supports under-par core titles any more. The consumer is so educated, so engaged - when a game is good, and you can use Red Dead Redemption as an example recently, even speaking to some of our partners people didn't think it was going to be as big as it was in May. But it shone through because of its quality, it created that water-cooler moment. It was unique, with innovative gameplay - a fantastic product, and massive Metacritic.

People talked about it - gamers are connected. I went onto Xbox Live and all my friends were playing it - I felt like I was missing out, and thought I needed to get the game. It's that sort of connection, the social side of gaming now, which means that the big games get bigger and bigger, and you can't afford to not be competitive and not have the quality there - because you just won't deliver the volume of games that you'd like to.

There are too many games that are released and top out at about 2 million units globally, because they haven't met that threshold. They're then in the trade-in bins, and then it's game over for the franchise.

We want to have all of our big IPs way above that - we want to break through into those bigger sales grooves, as we did with UFC 2009, which is close to 5 million units shipped now.