Street Fighting Man

Technically it's a different business unit than ours. But judging from our roadmap I think that there's still some business to be done. It's predominantly focused in Japan and some outer Asian territories. It's not something we get a lot of questions about: 'why isn't Street Fighter IV available in the arcade in the West?'

The answer is that the economics are a bit different over here. That said there are some things afoot that might change things.

Not at a publisher level, we haven't really participated in any consolidation. Our chairman, Tsujimoto-san has said repeatedly that we're not interested in acquisitions and mergers that don't allow us to make gains.

Where we have actually done a couple of acquisitions is on the developer side, such as Capcom Game Development Vancouver. I'm usually not an advocate of it unless we've done something with the company, we have good rapport, the corporate cultures mesh appropriately. If they don't, and people leave, well, what have you bought?

So we're very careful when it comes to acquisitions.

I would argue it's something that's definitely going to happen. It's not if, it's when. There's a lot of benefits to that model. I won't say there's going to be a wholesale migration to that model, but I'd definitely say it's going to emerge and become viable once the first parties embrace it. It's gonna happen.

I think a lot of it has to be that any drastic change in an ecosytem has to be done in a really gradual way - otherwise you can really upset the apple cart. I think there are measured steps and certain features and certain policies that are going to change and soften. It's not going to be - flick a switch and ta-da! Free to play is here. It'll slowly migrate towards that.

It might be really more emergent in the next generation of hardware.

Let me try and make you think a little differently. Let's talk about what's shrinking.

What's shrinking is retail. Total spend is increasing, but it's not being represented well. NPD actually put out recently a total spend summary. And it's a combination of their point of sale and consumer data. To try and accurately measure what's really happening.

So while we are seeing, maybe, what you're calling core platforms declining in revenue or becoming flat at retail, if you were to include DLC, digital purchases, you'd actually see that it is increasing. So we're not even, as I see it, at the real back of the normal life cycle curve yet.

As far as focus on social, I would argue that the evolution is all games.

One of my pet peeves is that we talk about social gaming. Quite frankly, social gaming is - in the future you're going to see Xbox LIVE, PSN and whatever Nintendo has, eventually morph into social networks. You're going to see networks of networks where those networks are interfacing with Facebook and Mixxi and QQ - take your pick. All games, whether they're Street Fighter, Devil May Cry or Frontierville, will all be social.

What we deem social gaming today, five years from now, will just be gaming. There won't be a distinction. In that regard I think that we don't necessarily need to adapt, or go for some sort of lowest common denominator experience with our brands. We have an audience that isn't going away, that is growing and a lot of those easier to get into experiences eventually do migrate people up into more serious, or eventually core experiences.

In a lot of ways they can be a gateway drug for future core players. So I don't know that we necessarily need to be all things to all people. In matter of fact, I think if we lose focus too much we may lose everybody.

We know who our customer is today and I think we serve them pretty well.