Ubisoft's Murray Pannell

I think everybody in the industry, if they're sensible, should be looking at costs and how much they're spending. While the industry seems to be weathering the storm, compared to other industries, I think the last couple of months if you look at Chart Track - and it's difficult to do year-on-year comparisons because you have to look at what games are coming out - but I think we're just being cautiously optimistic, rather than throwing everything at it.

There are some great products, and they'll get the investment that they need, but I'm not sure if we're spending more or less. Certainly what we are spending, for me, it's about being really clear on what our objectives are for success, and it's measuring wherever possible that success.

For Assassin's Creed 2 we recently spent some money doing promotion during a Da Vinci Code programme on Channel 5. We bought a TV ad there, promoted it and all the rest of it, and spent a few thousand doing that - when the game is six months away from launch. We'd never normally do that, and successful or not it's hard to tell - the indications are in terms of visits to the website and pre-orders, that they shot up, so it's looks like it. Will it affect sales? Who knows, until launch comes.

But I'd rather do that and learn from it, than just chuck all our money at TV at launch and hope that it works. It's about learning, measuring, and being responsible with our money.

It's quite interesting - the future, who knows? But it's important to look at it on a regional basis. So the UK is slightly different to Europe, and slightly different to the global and Japanese position.

So if I'm just looking at the UK specifically, we all know that Nintendo has done an amazing job, the 360 has solidified its position and is still doing well, and PlayStation I think would say themselves that they would have liked to have sold more hardware units.

You're in the industry, and most of the analysts are expecting some sort of price or value proposition from Sony to reignite their hardware sales. Coming at it from a platform perspective, when I was at Xbox we never underestimated the power of the brand for PlayStation - despite the hiccups they had at launch, and the price particularly, there's still a latent demand for that product. And if they can get their value proposition right in terms of pricing and online, and a software line-up that's unbeatable, they're still a force to be reckoned with.

But they will take a long time to even get their installed base up to that of the Xbox, let alone Nintendo's level, so they've got an uphill struggle in the UK.

Obviously we support all platforms, and frankly, the more installed base you've got, the more games you can sell. So we'd rather have all the platform holders growing the IP as much as they can, so there are more people playing games that we can sell to.

That's very much our hope, and we support all the platform holders where we can to push that, if that's exclusive games, or specific games for specific platforms to help drive those to new audiences.

It's certainly not going to decline. The question is, how long can it continue to grow at the rate of the last two years? I think the jury's out on that, but we're expecting a good year this year. Ubisoft has got some great titles, and if you look at the broader line-up there are some great titles as well - Square Enix coming in with Final Fantasy should be great, no doubt about it, and Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty... there's a lot of competition out there, and we'll all be looking eagerly to see what's coming when, but I enjoy the challenge - and there's plenty of consumers out there to appeal to, so we'll make sure we're getting our marketing, PR and product right to make sure they have a good time.