E3: Peter Moore

Oh his BMI - what was it? Upper twenties?

As he said, muscle is denser than fat.

But you know, it's a classic - you could have predicted it. Reggie, Iwata-san, Miyamoto-san, all come together. The only thing I found surprising - there was a lot of retrospective. In other words, it was a lot of PR reels of launch and stuff we all know. This wasn't educating the mass audience - this is E3. So I was a little surprised. But other than that I thought it was a classic Nintendo press conference, and they have a lot to be proud of.

Sony's was...interesting that they decided to try Home as a venue for Phil or for Jack or for Kaz to speak from, and I'm not sure what I felt about that. It felt a little forced. But they had the goods. I didn't see the end, but I assume they showed Killzone, and I don't know how that looked. And I saw Kojima-san talking about Metal Gear Solid, and that seemed to go on for a long time, and in the end I had to leave halfway through the trailer they showed. I remember him saying this is in-game footage, and it clearly looked very good, and it's Metal Gear, so it is going to be very good - I didn't get to see anything after that.

But other than that, I saw the PSP obviously - and clearly Sony still believes in the PSP, and they're going to have the new slimmed down and lighter version - will it or not still succeed against DS if they still see the DS as the competition. So I'm the wrong guy to ask. I always look at it through a different lens. I don't know what you guys thought, but it feels like we all now get into our rhythm and we do ours and they do theirs and now it's Jack more than Kaz, and Reggie's become the primary spokesperson and they show DS games and they show some cool stuff with the Wii.

No no, I was just quoting numbers, I wasn't making any commentary about them being a threat or not. That's NPD numbers so it's very accurate stuff, and we tend not to talk anecdotally or talk about our own internal numbers, so I only talk about NPD numbers and they're stunningly accurate.

So we just wanted to make sure that people understand in this new world of our industry that we shouldn't be totally fixated only on hardware installed base numbers, but focused on total consumer spending - and in a world where we've got consumers connected who are a great opportunity for us as an industry to advertise to, digital distribution, which all three companies talked about in their press conferences, advertising being a huge opportunity to this very desirable demographic, sponsored downloads, buying digital objects on Live, MMOs, all of the stuff that being connected now gives the opportunity to do - we start to look at what the mobile phone companies call ARPU - average revenue per user - and that's where you start looking at revenue from a number of sources.

In the old days of our industry you sold as much hardware as you can and you sell cartridges. And that was it. Those were the two ways you could bring in revenue. Now we're clearly selling hardware, we're clearly selling packaged games, we're clearly selling digital downloads, we're talking to companies like Pepsi and Nike and Nissan and Ford about advertising revenue flowing in, and not just the platform holders but third parties - so we start to look at different ways to measure success in the industry, and how much money you can garner from a consumer becomes one measurement of success - and how many opportunities they have to spend money. It's no different to when you go into a store back home and the bigger the department, and the more enticing the goods, the more likely you're going to spend money, so that's the idea - I don't want to sound like a corporate suit, but this is a business that has become a high-stakes business, and the cost of development and the cost of marketing continues to escalate. So we need to make sure that not only ourselves, but our partners have good opportunities to offset that cost.

Ah, so you've got a conspiracy theory there. No - the majority are Gold, and we have some very clear competitive reasons why we don't start breaking down revenues much crisper than that. We give a lot of information on online. We give you the total numbers. The one thing we do is we think every member is valuable to us because we could do commercial transactions with Silver and Gold. No, we're not lying to you, if that's the insinuation that somehow we're actually lying about the numbers.

Well, you just said the numbers aren't as good as I'm saying. There are complex GAP accounting things that we have to adhere to. Microsoft is a very conservative financial company, and rightly so, so we'll break down the numbers in the aggregate - after that, it just becomes very competitive, and we have to be careful how much information we start sharing.

No I didn't. Take Two I think reported something - and again I can't speak for companies that are publicly traded that are not Microsoft - but they reported - and didn't attribute it to us but reported getting revenues for, I can't remember the phrasing in their accounts, but recognising revenue for content in the future. So that is nothing with...we didn't make a statement.

We have a business arrangement, because there's a cost involved for Take-Two, for Rockstar to go and do things. Clearly business arrangements are always private, unless there is something there that forces what we call an 8-K in this country, or something on the 10-K, but it's a business arrangement that we have, that's no different from business arrangements that Sony has, no different than business arrangements Nintendo has. But yeah, we're delighted to be able to have that episodic content, and that stuff doesn't come for free. But we're not going to comment on somebody else's financials - that would be rude of us.