E3: Peter Moore

The Japanese underground consumer is probably not buying it as much as I would like. That's a fair comment. But again if that's your only measurement...I'm trying to make the point that it's more complicated and there are greater benefits that you don't see simply by Japanese Famitsu sales every week.

I just won't take no for an answer. We're just going to continue to develop games over there - Lost Odyssey's going to be fabulous - and we're going to keep hammering away, and everybody can keep criticising me because we're only selling three or five thousand a week.

Well, it depends what working means. That one measurement, that one measurement -

Yeah. One measurement, but hardware and what we do with our domestic subsidiary in Japan, it is not turning out the way I would have hoped it. Fair comment. The overall uber-strategy - so that's a tactic, the overall uber-strategy of ingratiating ourselves with some of the most powerful publishers in the world so we can deliver millions of units of games around the world, that is working.

I'd rather have both, but right now I'm happy...if I had a choice, I'm happy where I am. Believe me, you've been over there, you know the deal, it is not easy to do business, and you're probably right - we've done it either wrong, or haven't executed well, or somehow Sakaguchi was the wrong guy, or marketing has been flawed, but we're just going to keep going at it.

I'm not saying...it's tough to say you've done something wrong. The fact of the matter is I totally agree with our strategy of going out, sitting down with - we flew and met Sakaguchi-san three years ago in Hawaii where he lives, and we sat down and we figured this whole thing out. If the complaint last time was you don't have Japanese RPGs, well we went and got Japanese RPGs - and Blue Dragon's sold well. It hasn't blown the doors down by any means, but we believe in him, he's here, he's going to be showing you Lost Odyssey if you haven't seen it already, and we're going to keep pounding away in that market because it's a very important market.

You sit a year out and you say, "we're going to exactly land on that target," and we're a little short. In a world where - I think in this generation this industry is going to drive 150, 170 million consoles, being short a few hundred-thousand at a point in time in relation to what you thought you were going to be a year before - I think it's a rounding error. Yeah you like to say - you say around 12 million, you like to hit 12.

I'll point you again to last night. With what we've got coming, starting with BioShock, PGR, all the way into GTA IV, Splinter Cell, all the games that are coming - I'm confident. We can't talk about - until we get to earnings, which are a couple of weeks away, we can't talk about guidance for the next fiscal year, but we will do that. I just need to forecast better, I guess.

But I really think if you take it in the overall structure of a complete life cycle, it's a few hundred-thousand units in a monstrous business. I'm very excited about the length of this cycle. One of the great things about seeing the PS2 continue to sell well, particularly in Europe - it really gives us great confidence that we get our console - two, three, four years from now - at the right price point, with the number of games we're going to have for it, I think we're assured of the same success, and I think it benefits everybody.