Sidhe's Mario Wynands

As a market place it's always been strong relative to its size. I think at one point it was actually the leading country for PlayStation consoles per capita, and for a while it also had the highest number of female gamers as well.

So gaming has been a strong part of New Zealand, but in the scheme of things you can't build a console game for a country with a population of 4 million people, even if a large number of them are gamers - so we've always, from the outset, had more of a global approach. We've always looked to target the US and Europe, and Australasia as part of that.

In doing the Rugby League games, that was almost pulling us back to being more regional than we wanted to be, but I think it's really helped to create for us a stronger fanbase in New Zealand and Australia, and generated some awareness of us in the UK as well.

So we're looking at what's happened in digital distribution, and it's perfect for us. It's the epitome of what we're trying to do, because we're tucked away in a corner of the world which is very hard to get to - it represents this great opportunity where it doesn't matter where someone is in the world, and where we are in relation to them. We can access that consumer, and that's an approach we've taken for the release of out latest game, Shatter, where we have price parity all over the world. It's priced pretty much the same everywhere, and we haven't taken the approach that a lot of companies have where you price it one way in the US, then price gouge in Europe because you can, because Europe's always been getting price gouged.

We've taken the approach that it's a global marketplace, there's price parity, we recognise there are different demographics that make up the market, but there's local content appropriately. But let's treat the consumer base idea as, essentially, one big market. Digital distribution for us in that sense is really one of the big solutions to the problem that we started out with.

I think it's certainly been a problem for the PC shareware/download market, and it's certainly a problem with iPhone right now. There is so much content in those sorts of spaces - and I think the unfortunate issue that a lot of developers have is that they put too much reliance on the content, the quality, the innovation and story of the game to sell itself.

My analogy is that the gaming marketplace - especially the download space - people treat it like a buffet. There are so many different things to choose from and you can have as much or as little as you like - a developer comes along and puts down its bowl of macaroni and cheese and then stand back to wait for people to come and browse the buffet... some people might, some might not.

We treat the digitally distributed stuff that we do in the same way that we treat our retail products, where we're given the latitude by publishers to do PR and marketing, and really go out there, talk about the game and engage with consumers.

Obviously the more people that are doing that, the more noise there is, but we think we are reasonably well positioned, because we have tried to take the lead where we can, tried to be involved. We're the ones that have written and sent out the press releases, that have built the websites, that have managed the communities and forums - and I've offered to do that for free for our publisher because I recognise that while there's a cost to doing that, there's an inherent value in capturing those communities and going through the process of being seen, pushing our brand, and being associated with those products.

So we have a little experience, we know the process, we have the media contacts, reputable PR people and we have the infrastructure, capability and community there. I think we're taking the right approach, but it's hard to say, because we do continue to see people flood the iPhone space, we see people moving into the console download space - both diversifying from traditional console development and also as new studios starting up - so it's going to get more crowded.

Hopefully that marketing and PR capability that we have helps to give us a push, but we have to back it up with quality as well.