Rod Cousens - Part One

Yes - again, if you step back, none of this happens overnight. If you go back to the first one, and the evolution really of Colin McRae Rally into DiRT, we took a position then on approaching that market with DiRT and GriD - and we've added to that with Formula 1 - but what we've managed to do is move off of a position of novelty appeal with the first game and strengthened it with the second.

That goes back to the point I was making with Flashpoint - we set out on a path to launch these every other year on the basis we weren't prepared to compromise quality. You play to your strengths, and one of our strengths is racing - and we're establishing a foothold in that particular segment which I believe is going to be very difficult to beat.

Yes, people will outspend us in terms of development and marketing, yes, some of our competition comes from the platform holders (where clearly there are benefits to being a platform holder versus a third party), but we stand up against them. If you measure us against them, we stack up with the best - and I think that's been recognised throughout the industry. A statement would be: "Yes, we do good racing."

Yes, because ideally what you get down to... I don't say this flippantly, but one of the easiest approaches to the market if you're sat in that position is to throw money at it. We haven't got that luxury.

But what we do is get back to the core DNA. We've listened to consumers, to our fanbase, and hopefully we respond to them and give them what they want. Yes, we love racing within the studios and there's a great feel for it in the company, but we do a lot of research - and there's a lot of connection with the consumers, both the established Codie fans and those who we're trying to add to that list.

We listen, and we respond - so as a company we try to be extremely agile, responsive to our consumers, and give them what they want. That's the experience.

Obviously, that helps. I think there's a number of factors - if you look at what's gone on in Formula 1 there's been some interesting activity. Just first of all, let's take the shift in broadcaster to the BBC, and the position of Formula 1 within that where they've tried to broaden the audience to a younger range - even down to the presenter of the show itself, the whole marketing of it, and so on. You have to give credit where credit is due, and the BBC has done a tremendous job.

The second is the market expansion - this past weekend was the Abu Dhabi grand prix, they're going into areas now where if you look at the future potential of it (and don't forget this is the second largest sport behind football/soccer) and some of the more emerging markets - whether it's India, China, the Middle East and so on - there's a lot of groundwork going on behind the scenes to broaden the sport itself. That can benefit us.

Then if you go back to Codemasters and the game itself, what we're not prepared to do and what we will not do as a company is more of the same. When you have a series of games... and the one thing that slightly troubles me in the market today is if we as an industry do not continue to innovate in games, we will turn off our consumer.

While there may be a view that you can't publish new IP with any great success, I don't buy off on that. If all you're going to do is more of the same, then we'll face all the hurdles and obstacles that the music and movie businesses have faced before. If we don't learn from that, then shame on us.