THQ's Danny Bilson

Absolutely. It's a statement about how we believe original IP lands and is valuable to gamers, no matter what. I think what we've seen in the industry is a world in which only the best triple-A games are going to work - but when they work, they work phenomenally well financially - and the extensions of the business are in the casual area. That's where lots of games can be made inexpensively, and reach the social network stuff.

But that's a different audience - our audience is still, and always will be, the core gamers that built the core game business. I'm a firm believer that the games business was built on those people that want the deep, immersive experiences - they've grown up with that, and funded it.

Everything else is more of an extension to that. I keep using the word 'core' - but the fundamental core of the industry is the core gamer, on these core experiences. To give them what they expect on these platforms over the last few years, it'll cost upwards of $30 million to build deep, robust experiences.

The difference is that it used to be, about ten years ago, that videogames sold just because they were videogames. The artform was cool and people just gobbled up all kinds of stuff - but with the economy the way it is, and people just getting smarter or more experienced in games... it's more like the movie business. Only the great ones, the blockbusters, will cut through - so our mission is to launch one of those every quarter and support it fully both with marketing and production, to compete at the highest level with the best games in the world.

That's what this studio in Montreal is all about.

Yes - we have a pretty good pipeline now since the reorganisation that started a couple of years ago in which we closed about half the studios and, at least in our group, focused on these blockbuster games. That pipeline's laid out pretty nicely.

Could one move? Yes. Could something pull in? Occasionally, not usually. In game development almost always the more time you give a team the better the game gets. You saw us move Red Faction from our Q4 in March to May, and that was absolutely about getting the game to the highest quality.

And also, we didn't need two blockbusters jamming into the end of the fiscal year for the financial sector to be happy. The financial sector will be happy when we make a lot of money, and spreading out those two releases positions us better. It also focuses our talent, our marketing and sales forces against each one, separate by a few months.

So we do have a pretty solid plan - I'm not seeing or feeling a lot of slippage going on next year in the games. What we really do here now is move them early - we have really good systems in the studios now where we can tell a year to a year and a half out how they're tracking.

For instance we recently moved one game that we haven't announced yet officially - it's a major title coming next Fall, that was in August that will now be in November. We'll announce that soon, but we moved it a couple of months ago, so it doesn't shock the sales force, doesn't shock retail - our titles won't be disappearing. We're moving them out, but we're doing that well in advance - and we can have a very good sense of where they are at least a year out.

It'll go both. We have to get the experienced veterans in there to mentor new talent. We need the students and the teachers, absolutely - and they can come from anywhere in the world. The one thing about the province is that they're extremely receptive to foreign talent.

Back about ten or twelve years ago when I was in the film business and we were making a bunch of television in Vancouver, you really could only bring - for instance - so many Americans up there. That's not the case here - they want to grow the community from people all over the world, so it'll be a combination of local talent as well.

One of the team is being led by one of the foremost developers in Montreal - Patrice [Desilets] - and on the other team it'll be led by some talent coming up from the States. But the youth coming out of the universities will be trained up and integrated in - this is a multi-cultural, multi-national industry, and that's what you'll see in our Montreal studio.