Jon Rooke & Adam Roberts: Part One

We've gone out publicly and quoted softer sales than we would have liked on UFC. Last year it was the perfect storm, and there were a number of factors. The game looked amazing - it was the first true next-gen MMA title coming to the market, and we had great assets bringing it in. There was a massive demand for the UFC brand, which was really exploding at that point in time.

And we benefited from a relatively clear competitive window as well, and that's probably the main one for me - with UFC 2009 we really picked up that mass-market hit. We were the game that everybody was playing on Xbox Live last year, and the Xbox 360 demo has gone on to be something like the second- or third-largest demo of all time on that platform.

I think this year we've not had that perfect storm. We've had Red Dead Redemption released one week before us and that sucked, to-date, probably three quarters of a million units from the market. The economy is still in decline - we haven't come out of recession yet, with VAT set to go up and the government looking for 40 per cent budget cuts... people are nervous about spending.

Yes - there was that macro-setting, plus we were around the World Cup, which takes out a lot of consumer spending as well. You could even put into there the iPad launch as being on the same weekend - so a lot of things are coming on to it.

Now, the product quality itself is much higher than it was last year, with a Metacritic that's up by another two or three points - and we've had a fantastic reaction from the consumers. But I think where we're probably not benefited from is attaching into that hit buyer.

The UFC fan has got it, the MMA fan has got it - but that hit buyer is saying: "I'm only going to buy one game this month; I've already got the 2009 edition, and it's bloody amazing. 2010 is great, but I'll probably wait a few months before I get it, maybe when it's cheaper in price or there's an offer at retail."

Absolutely - we know from 2009 that the brand has massive long legs. Last Christmas we were still selling a lot of units across Europe per week, a good seven or eight months after the game came out. We're seeing the sales for 2010 settle down to a good, steady pace and we're working that stock through the channels with our partners - and we've got a lot of stuff to come from UFC as well.

We've got great brand awareness among that UFC consumer, and we know they're going to come to the brand - we know they're going to come to purchase. But it was just that a number of factors - predominantly Red Dead Redemption sucked so much cash out of the market.

And time as well - people spent a long time playing it.

Indeed - as an open-world game you don't play it for a weekend and then trade it back in. People are still playing it now on Xbox Live. Sometimes those things just happen - and we still stand up against it.

When Red Dead had shipped about 5 million we'd shipped about 2.6 million units of UFC globally - so it's still a massively successful game... just that the expectations might have been that little bit more. You have to step back a bit and recognise that.

We're absolutely not walking away from the brand - we've got a long term commitment to it as we've shown with things like UFC Trainer, and it won't be long before we start talking about UFC 2011, I'm sure...