SOE's John Smedley

That's a really tough question. My gut tells me that, just like on PC, it's going to become an increasing part of the business. There are a lot of people out there that have, in the past, associated free-to-play with lower quality - and simply put, that's just not true any more. There are a lot of free-to-play games that are great, and I think that's going to come over to console just as well.

With the console, we're selling to an audience that already has the PS3 obviously - and by the way not the just the PS3, but in the future I can other devices. Sony's announced the NGP, and if that isn't a perfect machine for doing MMOs on, then I don't know what is.

So it's too soon to tell for sure but I think you're going to start seeing free-to-play gaming on console as well. People will realise that getting a lot more folk to try their games using that kind of business model will help; it'll just be in addition to the Blu-ray business model.

The interesting thing here is making sure that the business results follow the investment. A good example for us with FreeRealms is that we've been able to take that same technology base and use it for another game, Clone Wars. We got that finished in less than a year - a very high quality game, but built on our engine, and we're using the same technology base to power other games we're working on.

So for us, the pay-off comes from having multiple games with different business models. We're doing some subscription stuff, like DCUO; we're doing some free-to-play stuff, like FreeRealms - and probably some others we haven't announced yet.

We see this as making a number of bets, and smart bets at that.

I'm sure there will be a lot of people giving it a try. The difference here - and this is a really big difference - is that on the console you're going to have to spend a lot of money to get in there to begin with.

So I'd expect there to be a lot down the road, but it'll take time to try to do it, frankly. I think that will give us a lead for a while, and we're not resting on our laurels - we've got other games we're working on. It's going to take some time, but I'm pretty confident in our ability to iterate on what we've got, and add other cool games that we want to do.

Not at all - in fact, quite the opposite. Everybody wants to see what happens with this business model, and our sister companies are glad to see that being done.

It has, in such a major way. The biggest advantage that we have is this large swell of knowledge with the SCE family, and we've been able to tap that to get help where we've needed it. I'd like to think too that we've contributed to the overall PlayStation Network, and some of what we've asked for is winding its way back too.

It's something we're really happy about - and most people don't realise that we've actually got 32 published PSN titles. All of the PopCap stuff, we publish.

It'll be a little different on the PS3 - yes, we're transferring it, but the restrictions are at the account level. So we follow the same rules that all the other titles follow - there's a great set of parental controls that our games work with, and the PS3 really makes it super-easy to keep your kids safe.

Luckily we've got that standing in front of us - and then doing double duty is our game-watching stuff. We monitor literally everything that's said in chat.