SEGA's John Clark

It sold well enough to position SEGA as a company that's prepared to invest in high quality, new IP.

Yes. You can look at quality thresholds and the proven track records of Sonic and Total War and Football Manager, but the industry we're in demands creativity and innovation. There has to be inspiration from the development level as well as the publishing level. There has to be balance.

Particularly in the UK, we're really proud of what we achieved with Mario and Sonic. Out of all the European territories, and even the US, we've got by far the best attach rate. If you look at the Chart-Track report, in the last nine years the only games that have outsold Mario and Sonic are Brain Training, GTA San Andreas, Wii Play, Wii Fit and FIFA 2009. And at last count, FIFA had only outsold Mario and Sonic by 2000 units.

How long is a piece of string? We think the other titles vying for that spot are FIFA and Modern Warfare 2. We know Mario and Sonic is going to be in the top three.

The original Mario & Sonic - for Wii only - achieved an attach rate of something like 30 per cent to hardware. If we've got our hardware forecasts correct, and of course that could be influenced by the price drops on the other formats, we could be Christmas number one if we achieved a 15 per cent attach rate. So we've got a really strong chance.

You work with every single hardware publisher in completely different ways. Historically, you always see Nintendo titles doing exceptionally well on Nintendo formats. With the Wii, we saw a massive opportunity to release titles because everything was selling so quickly and going out of stock. There were quick development timelines and opportune moments to get lots of software sales, we we announced a plethora of releases.

Nintendo just carried on doing what they do, which is releasing good quality games. But they've released different games, more lifestyle titles, and other publishers are looking to take a share of that market. I think the emphasis has to be on publishers to think about the games they bring out.

I think last year was the peak for hardware, and software always seems to follow just behind. This year hardware will still be strong, but not as strong as last year, in my opinion. Software will be bigger.

The attach rate will be stronger and this will be the year software peaks - anything between 2 and 10 per cent bigger in value than last year. This Christmas is software's peak, and therefore revenues overall at retail are going to be really strong.