IO Interactive's Niels Jørgensen

It's interesting to look at trends like DLC. DLC can play a number of roles throughout a product's lifecycle: it can hopefully prevent second-hand sales and it can also continue to provide new experiences to the consumer and maybe incentivise them to go back for another play-through.

My personal opinion is that we'll continue to see more and more of this. I think that the long time between major releases will begin to reduce over time and DLC can certainly help keep consumers interested in the meantime.

I think it's quite difficult to generalise on that subject. Of course, there's a natural limit to budgets: you can only spend so much and it still be possible to recoup your investment on a product. There are some interesting trends that we're seeing with more casual titles and I think as the target audience of PC and especially consoles diversifies, I think we're going to continue to see game budgets that skew in both directions.

Some will be very expensive and some will be very cheap, so I think it's going to be a spreading in two different directions for different types of title, I don't think game budgets are going to move in just one direction.

I think it'll always be possible [to create triple-A titles] but it's always going to be a huge investment if you set out to create these products. You need to make sure you have strong financial backing in order to undertake these projects but that could come from 1st parties or from the big publishers, I think either will work.

I think that the graphical style and characters really showed what [Mini Ninjas] was all about. For us it was interesting to try to break out of that mature genre and explore a new world and create something that could be enjoyed by the whole family. This perhaps reflects the fact that the guys at the studio are getting a bit older and many of them have children now and they wanted to have something that they could play with their family.

With regard to our more mature titles, we've learned a lot from trying to entertain a different audience and I think we've been able to take some of those lessons and apply them to our other franchises. Many people at the studio are very fond of the more casual genre so it may be something that we look at again, you never know.

I think that it's possible but I wonder how necessary that is. Studios can certainly come out with different genres or titles aimed at different demographics and I think that consumers are intelligent enough to know what titles are aimed at what audiences.

It's more important for a company like Disney to have those different labels because people expect very specific, child friendly products from Disney and I think that consumers of videogames don't have those same expectations so with the rating system and proper marketing and positioning we can reach the right audience.

I feel that the market is polarising a bit and we need to make sure that the titles that we produce have flair and a certain level of quality in order to stand out from all the good titles out there.

Having established, strong IP is a help in standing out but it's certainly not the only way because there will always continue to be new IPs. However, as we get towards the end of the hardware cycle the more well-known you are, the more competitive advantage you have.