Simply Put

Absolutely. It's a fairly lazy excuse that by slashing the prices of games the retailers are giving the customer what they want. Of course they are in the short term, but what it means is that same customer is going to be very disappointed when they turn up two or three weeks later to buy the next big game and it's up to twice the price.

Well, SimplyGames.com doesn't have a bricks-and-mortar high street presence but I sincerely hope that traditional bricks-and-mortar retail model remains in place for many years as is possible. The specialist chains out there, the independent stores out there, do our industry proud.

I myself still enjoy going to specialist retailers to enjoy the experience of being surrounded by videogames and consoles and I enjoy the retail environment that those stores create so I sincerely hope that for the sake of the industry the high street retail specialists remain around for as long as is effective.

Without a doubt there is a market for these added value Collector's Edition SKUs. Typically, and I accept that it's generalising somewhat, it'll be the more hardcore games for a hardcore audience that you'll see these packages for - but they do add value.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course, but I absolutely agree that they are a good idea and are an example of intelligent retailing. Unfortunately the distribution of these SKUs is strange to put it mildly and they are very difficult to get hold of, as their availability is usually scaled entirely to the volume of the normal SKU that you've purchased.

It does mean sometimes that a sensible business practice that dictates the volume that you're buying is consequently going to restrict the volume of these special editions that independent retailers are going to be able to get hold of. It's a process that can probably be managed better.

I sincerely hope so. This quarter's release schedule is one of the most sensibly divided up I've seen in nearly 20 years of buying videogames. I'm not sure why it's happened but I think the short answer is that it's Modern Warfare 2 and everyone is running scared of that - but I also hope that publishers are seeing that this quarter will be such an important one for the increase in the installed user base because of the reduction in price of the consoles.

This is going to be a massive console selling period and in the early part of next year, and indeed the rest of 2010, there will be a wider audience for software - I think it's important for all retailers that we go in to 2010 with some fantastic releases ahead of us. We're all used to seeing good number of good games squashed to the point of insignificance into a quarter that is just too crowded.

I can remember the VHS industry in 1991 when the home film industry used to run scared of the summer, in 1991 Home Alone and Ghost were released in the middle of June, traditionally was one of the quietest months of the year, and guess what happened? You bring great products out and they'll sell through regardless.

I think all of those products are highly innovative and this industry needs innovation. The Wii is a good example of that and if you take last year's sales of the Wii when there were real killer applications in things like Mario Kart and Wii Fit we saw periods of fantastic hardware sales. In contrast the periods where there weren't such innovative titles lower sales of the hardware reflected that.

I think that these products show that as hardware manufacturers have to invest more and more in each piece of new technology they are looking to get a longer life out of each and it means that [for this hardware generation] we could ultimately have a ten year stint.