IG: With the camera controls coming out, one of the things I asked of John Riccitiello was the effect it will have on the console cycle. I know publishers are talking about how this will be a longer than traditional console cycle, but he felt that these motion sensing controllers would further lengthen the console cycle. Is that something you agree with, that we're going to see a really long console cycle now?
MG: I think the conventional wisdom is that the console cycle will be longer. I think those types of physical interface innovations do contribute to that. I think the increased popularity of downloadable content contributes to it. Ultimately, I think it will be decided by someone having real innovation on the hardware side; and whoever has that, I don't expect them to hold back and that will trigger a reaction across the other hardware developers, but I think in general, we're all expecting the cycle to be a little bit longer.
IG: For the outlook for 2009, what is your take on where sales will end up? We had some really slow months where people talked about the recession catching up with the video game industry finally but there also were some very tough comparisons to 2008 numbers. What's your sense for how the industry will play out in 2009?
MG: I'm optimistic and I think the recent couple of months you do have to look at the base period where Easter changed from one month to another, Grand Theft Auto IV launched in the base period, so there were a couple of built in very difficult comparisons, but everything we're hearing and seeing from retailers continues to give us confidence that by the time the dust settles on 2009 we'll see low to mid single digit growth.
IG: What's your thinking about the flood of holiday titles that this industry always has? There was an interesting analyst report about that from the folks at EEDAR about how there is a 15 to 20 percent increase in sales and those games do better on Metacritic as well, but gamers seem to complain about how there are way too many games during this period of time. So are publishers putting games in a window where they shouldn't be competing against other titles and it just gets too crowded? In terms of a product release standpoint for Activision, is that something that's evolving now where you perhaps try to spread it out across the year?
MG: I think from a business point-of-view, our company has become much more evenly spread throughout the year. We have the Blizzard business, which is subscription driven throughout the year. You've got Guitar Hero, which has been much more evenly spread throughout the year. Now, there's still a holiday seasonality and I think that will be with us forever, but how important it is really depends on the type of title ,and the more you get into a title that's going to be driven by gifting approach versus a title that's going to be played by the hardcore gamer, I think you have different requirements on when that's launched to optimize it. We've seen our own business start to flatten out and start to distribute itself a little bit more evenly throughout the year but holiday is still going to be disproportionately important.
IG: Yeah, it seems inherent to this industry, just like summer blockbusters in Hollywood.
MG: Exactly.
