Namco Bandai's John Galloway
The Namco Bandai Partners VP outlines ambitious plans to be a top five publisher within five years
I wouldn't look at them as challenges, so much as opportunities that we've got. The team that we have in the UK is very established - a great PR and marketing team - and we've got all the strong links with retail. Now what we can bring to the party is the correct product flow for that market, and that's exciting - a huge opportunity.
That's quite easy - we've been doing it, and I don't want to talk ill of previous years... there have been ups and downs, but this new phase for the people that have been there over the years - we're now Namco Bandai, we're starting from base one, and moving forward from there. The new product flow will give us some great strength.
My last three years at EA was heading up the Nordic region and I'll say again what I said at the time - I welcome all the other publishers to come into that market space. It is worth it - there's a population of 25 million, and there's quite a bit of money - even with the tax rates they've got - and a lot of gamers playing.
What I think has happened over the past couple of years is that one thing's led to another into the decline - the publishers who have been going through Distribution have obviously had to look at their costs over the past 12-18 months as the economy worldwide has deteriorated, and they've had to pull back.
And where they haven't had offices, they've pulled back support - but pulling back that support has made the market itself decline. EA is still doing very well over there, because they've got the offices and staff there. We've been doing well there as well, with distribution - so for us it's like coming from a nowhere base, and it gives us a foot in the door in the Nordic region.
But I encourage others to come into the market place, spend some dollars talking to the consumer and spend some dollars making that market work. EA have done very well there, and I don't want to take anything away from them, but they've really been the only ones doing it. And I know the business model... so that's very exciting for us.
Well, Namco Bandai are famous for very Japanese games, like DragonBall, which sell in the UK but not to the level they sell in Japan. For us to grow as a business we need more Western-style games, and if that leads you into working with Western developers, then that's where we'll go.
We're working very closely now with Ninja Theory - there's a partnership there to work on their next big game, which is pretty amazing and we'll announce that soon. We're also working with a studio on a game for Clash of the Titans, the Warner Bros movie, which is an epic movie starring Liam Neeson.
And we've also got a new IP called Magin, which is a bit of a new take on gameplay in terms of the quality of the AI and how it works with other characters. That's quite revolutionary, actually. That's not it - we have more big announcements to make in the coming months, but that's a start.
When you come back to the growth we're looking at over the next three-to-five years, we're not going to get that growth solely on Microsoft selling more hardware - we need to bring in the right products, and this is the first step.