Sega's Mike Hayes

First of all on Wii, I mean, at some point we were the biggest, certainly top three third party publisher on Wii so for us it was a great platform, initially with Sonic Rings. Even our redux, things like Ghost Squad, House Of The Dead. And then of course Mario & Sonic which is absolutely huge, so we've got absolutely no qualms about that. And I think there's of similarities in terms of Sega characters and Nintendo characters because of the era and the love that the fanbase has got.

And I just think we're all a bit premature in being a bit glass half full on 3DS. Everyone was clamouring "oh please bring it out in March, you must bring it out" and then it's like you get to June and it's all "sales aren't very good... well they haven't got the software yet."

Then Nintendo announced those five brilliant titles, I mean for me, Starwing - as I still call it, because I gave it that name when I was at Nintendo - Starfox, that for me, my two girls have got a 3DS, and I'm going to be taking it play that. What a brilliant game. And then with Mario, Mario Kart, we've got third generations, and we're going to have Mario & Sonic, will it be as big as DS? I've got no idea, probably it won't be. Will it be a very viable hand-held project? Absolutely.

Will 3DS be as big as DS? Probably it won't be. Will it be a very viable hand-held project? Absolutely

So you know, we'd like to be selling more Monkey Ball right now, but I've got no issue that come Christmas that's going to accelerate, particularly those titles. You know what Nintendo platforms are, they need that killer Mario or that killer Zelda title to make it fly. And they haven't been there. If it had been launched with Super Mario Brothers and the sales were like they are now then I think we'd be slightly more nervous, but that's all to come.

That's a really good question. The one thing now about Wii U of course it that its high definition, so there's now going to be a lot of commonality, but I think we've got to be careful that we don't just want to bring across everything willy-nilly because its another platform that we can advertise our cost on. That controller is absolutely brilliant and we have to think of innovative ways to use the controller. So actually the benefit of Wii U is that you can bring across... we're doing high definition Sonics, we're doing obviously Aliens: Colonial Marines, so you can bring them across, and that's relatively low cost, which is good news, then you spend your money on how do you use that controller effectively to make it unique and differentiate it. And that's kind of how we're thinking. So it's a relatively low cost way of getting into that.

The handhelds are a bit different actually because they're quite bespoke and there's very little crossover, but I think for us when you have IPs where you know you're going to get a pretty good critical mass in terms of sales, then those stand alone budgets that you have to find are relevant. The issue of course for us is, and I'm sure everyone talks about it endlessly, but the platform range now is just so big. Particularly because we're spending a lot of time and money on XBLA and PSN games, we've got Renegade Ops and we'll make a lot of other new IP announcements over the next few months. We're spending a lot of time on iOS and actually there's very little that you can cross-fertilise apart from the brand so it's quite interesting that we've actually taken a development budget and we're ring fencing certain amounts for each knowing that the amount of crossover there will be is going to be relatively limited.

What that does mean though is that in the high end we'll be spending less money. Like I think every other publisher is saying. What was is somebody said? "There's no room for AA games." So actually, just concentrate on the big ones that you know have got a reasonable chance of success, take out some of that money that you would spend trying to compete on something like a Call Of Duty - which let's be honest is more or less impossible - and allocate that to handheld or to console download or whatever, and it sort of spreads the risk and spreads the money. As a development model that seems to be working.