To Be This Good Takes AGES

Well, with AvP coming out... maybe you could talk about the quality of AvP but people really, really wanted to play it. There's still a passion there for that, for the license and the property. And then I know what we're doing with that property takes us a little bit into a more interesting place, so we're not knocking a bog-standard space marine shooter.

It's going to be a great game in its own right, and it will have the license as well.

We're pragmatic about what those platforms are going to be, given the timing and stuff. Can't say any more than that.

Yes. I can't say when it's out, but absolutely. SEGA have invested the right amount of money in this project so it can absolutely deliver, and now it's down to us to do it.

Well, a lot of that is confidential, but in terms of what we can do in the world of Aliens we do have an excellent relationship with Fox. And they understand games - it's incredible how they understand the business. So the creative scope that we have is actually very good. There's always going to be limitations because it's an IP, but from a gaming point of view I think they're a great partner to work with, because they are giving us a lot of freedom to develop that IP in a positive way for gaming. As Tim said earlier, we are trying to create a brilliant game, so we need to be able to do that first and foremost within the world of the IP, rather than "here's the script, go make the script". That, I think, is very important for us on this project. With Aliens vs Predator we had such a big success with that project, so we think if we create interesting and high quality variations upon that world, then I think commercially it could run and run. It's such a powerful license, quite a unique one in that respect.

Yeah, absolutely. With something like Aliens, because it's so strong it potentially de-risks a project in so far as we don't need to spend so much marketing money. So when you see some of the behemoth new IPs coming out from our competitors and I see the rumoured amounts of money that's being spent on development but also purely on marketing, it begins to make your toes curl. It does show that the risk is so much greater. So having a Football Manager, a Total War, a Monkey Ball, an Alien, a Sonic in the portfolio does give you a degree of stability. Key within all that is how we transition it over to less traditional gaming markets, but with that IP you can definitely have a more sure-footed potential of success. But it's never guaranteed.

I don't think absolute size and market share in this business is remotely important. What is important is we're a business - these [CA] are the clever guys, the creative ones, but we run the business. At the end of the day, we're in business to make money out of our IP. To do that, we have to have excellence in creativity, and that I think is a discipline that Creative Assembly and Sports Interactive both show. That's the most important thing.

So do we want to be a number one publisher, a number five? I actually don't care. It's just whether we're achieving the financial goals that we have. And a lot of that is now hidden, because a lot of gaming is not audited now - everyone's obsessed and focused on Chart-Track and seeing declines, but actually they're not seeing the huge business underneath that which isn't being audited. Whether that's paid DLC, whether it's digital download, whether it's iOS sales... Gaming is an unbelievably vibrant business, it's just that a certain portion at the moment is not doing as well as it has been. If you can be successful in all of those sectors, then you've got a very, very viable business. Who actually knows how big Activision, EA, Ubi, Sony actually are, because most of it's now not audited? It's quite an interesting conundrum - you can only see it on the bottom-line results these days. For us, that's what counts.