Jon Rooke & Adam Roberts: Part Two

Well, you can have great product that's sold next to nothing, while having a poor product that's sold millions. But the key thing about this product is that if we don't believe it's ready, we won't launch it.

We were talking about how good the product is, how good it's going to be - what I measure that on is how many of my customers are coming to me and telling me how good it is. Normally it's the other way around - so to me that's something that very rarely happens in this business. I'm very excited about it.

Well, to me it started at E3, and we're building on it now. Retailers are now working on their calendar Q4 plans, and while Homefront is coming a bit later, we'll be working well before the end of this year on setting things up. It's looking really good.

We will be genre-competitive to make sure we stand out. Actually I think, more than anything, we'll be creatively different - we'll differentiate within that genre. We don't want to be "Man With Gun" - we're very different to that. Our setting really helps us with that, as does the emotive story - we can play with that, and we will be thought-provoking.

Sometimes we might shock people through the campaign - we probably don't have the intention to do that, but the creative and imagery we'll be using to tell the story may cause some people to be shocked. But we want people to think, because when they think, they're engaged - and they want to find out more.

We have a fantastically rich background and story - there's a document that exists at THQ that set out the timeframe from 2010 - today - all the way to 2027 and beyond. It's about 1000 pages long - we know what this universe is and where we're going to take it.

That's the most important thing - because we then know how deep, rich and engaging that universe is, and consumer will be able to get engaged through the marketing that we do. You'll see a lot more from Homefront very soon.

We'll have a big presence for it at the Eurogamer Expo, and we will be activating our programmes at retail through peak, into New Year - we're not going to wait until January to turn it on. There's a great opportunity, with a number of other major first-person shooters coming out this side of Christmas, to actually engage that consumer as they're purchasing other titles - then retain and harvest them as we come into the launch of Homefront.