Nintendo's David Yarnton

One of the things we're working with retail on, and is really important as far as we're concerned, is pre-orders with our customers so that we can make sure the stock is in the right places and we don't just go and give stock willy-nilly to the market. We need to make sure we can satisfy that consumer demand. So pre-orders are really important and that's how we're looking to allocate second chances of stock based on the retailer pre-orders. We're pretty confident we'll be able to guarantee whatever they pre-order.

As we get closer to launch we'll have a better indication. We know some of our customers have already got quite significant pre-orders and deposits paid and we hadn't even given them a price or anything like that. In our presentation today they got a good indication of price and they're going up online now with prices that consumers will understand. In one place we saw pre-orders at £300 and they were still taking orders so for those guys it's come down. As we get closer we'll get a better indication of that.

If we go back historically and look at things like Wii and even the DS, the demand for the product has just been so huge, any manufacturing company would probably have trouble keeping up with it. If you look at the numbers that Wii's done, especially in 2008 and 2009, it was just phenomenal. No one could have forecast those numbers. I think we did a really good job in meeting the demand out there. Now, there's no guarantee but we've also got the DS, the DSi and the DSXL so there's a lot of product to sell.

If you look at the different systems there are entry points for different consumers. There are the late adopters that never jump into the new products straight away. There will also be a lot more people who aren't necessarily gamers who are into their technology and will see that what 3DS offers is an experience they can't get anywhere else.

A lot of late adopters are only just coming into the market with the DSi and the DS XL. I think last year the DS was the top-selling hardware unit for over 30 weeks of the year. We still see it as an entry point and an opportunity to develop.

We've had huge sampling experiences on Wii and DS in the past and we properly started that whole touring the product, we've been doing that for years. With 3DS it's going to be the biggest sampling campaign that we've ever done. We're looking at between 400,000-500,000 consumer samples up to Easter this year.

And because we're doing a combination of not only interactive in stores but also consumer events, and then samples in shopping centres... we see the opportunity as so important. How do we explain the 3D? We can paint a picture but until you actually experience it you're not going to see the full value of it. Sampling is huge, it's a major investment for us.

Early on our promotion is towards the early adopters and we're actually starting our campaigns five or six weeks before launch, which is quite early for us. Normally we don't start a lot of our advertising until much later. As we get closer to launch we'll broaden it out as well. There are games there that will appeal to everyone and for the core there's quite a lot of product that we wouldn't normally have at launch.

I don't know the technical side of things and we wouldn't normally publish what those are. We're still pretty confident we'll have a lot more security in place with the launch of the 3DS - not that the others were necessarily bad - but 3DS is going to be a lot more secure.