Due South

Oh, absolutely. Like I said, that's the most disappointing part for us - some people, attorneys or whoever, used the press to try to put pressure on us, to try to squeeze a better deal out of us, to try to paint a negative picture of us. That's definitely a challenge for us, because we spend a lot of time with our partners reassuring them that everything is fine. That's not how we want to spend our time we want to sell games.

I think the press - not that you guys are doing it yourself, but people using the press have done what they can to harm the name and harm the brand, make people nervous about that, but I think that the partners we work with still support us. I think we've got various strategies going forwards in regards to different labels and how we operate with the digital strategy and some of those things. But, y'know, we're still Southpeak.

For us, we've got some games we're really excited about. A couple of them we've been waiting for a while. Two Worlds II is probably our next big release - we're really excited about that game, it looks fantastic, it launched in Europe already and is doing very well. Stronghold 3 is another big property for us - it kind of leads into our digital initiative, it has a great development team and is a great looking game.

We have another game that we've partnered with NVIDIA with. We haven't announced the title yet, but we will do so at CES. That will be using the UE3 engine, and will be part of a lot of OEM deals that NVIDIA is making. There's a lot of opportunity with NVIDIA, we've been working with them on several titles. We've announced a partnership, but we've not announced any specific titles yet.

We're looking at 3DS. I think that has lots of potential, and most publishers who have been on board with Nintendo's initial platform releases have done very well. I think there's some opportunity there, and we have some opportunity with particular titles at a certain price point. We specifically had a Wii title that we could have released in 2009, but we held it for 2010. I think it's doing better than it would have done in the market in 2009, when there were so many Wii titles. We've seen a good price point and there's just not as much competition as there was. There's a huge install base, so...

Yeah, that's always been a challenge - Nintendo does great games so it's hard to compete with those. But we sold over a million pieces of the My Baby franchise, so even with that we've been able to be pretty successful on DS, and we've got some Wii games that are doing great. It's always about the game, right? If the game's right and gets the right audience, the right timing and the right price, then it can sell. You can't count Nintendo out, that's for sure.

Digital is certainly something that we're working hard on. Retail, I think there's a lot of opportunity to sell there but extend the lifecycle also through digital initiatives. There's also a lot of product that's available to us right now that we could bring to PSN and XBLA. It's great product, but these developers need a publisher to bring it to market through PSN and XBLA. There seems to be a lot of those opportunities, so I think you'll see a lot more from us in terms of retail and also going digital. Terry mentioned Stronghold 3 earlier - I think that's a perfect example of a title for us that will straddle both sides. It'll be a PC boxed title that'll also have very strong digital sales. That's going to ramp up our digital business, if you will.

Yeah, we're definitely looking to those platforms. As I mentioned, we will be announcing a product this month that will be available for Android. There's a lot of opportunity there. From a development standpoint, it's a much shorter timeframe than it is putting out a retail box, so there's a lot of product and titles that we're working on right now that you could see in three months. We'll see quite a few of those releases next month.

We have a UE3 studio license, so with Infinity Blade and what's happened there, we think that's an ideal development tool and platform for us to focus on tablets and phones and 'droid, and to use that engine to bring some great-looking product to the market.

Yeah, it did a great job with the pricing, and those guys are pretty smart. I guess people will follow their lead in some cases. I guess you've got to do a great game for people to pay that price, but from what we can tell it looks like people are prepared to pay it if the quality's there. So I think the opportunity's definitely there to do it, but our overall model isn't changing. We've always worked with independent developers, bringing games to console. We'll keep doing that but maybe digitally and any other applications, because it gives us a lot of opportunity to create unique kinds of products.