"Our competitor online [is] Facebook in some respects. Even though they don't create content, they provide it. There are a lot of new social gaming companies that are emerging and take mindshare - not from our consumer, [because they're] a different demographic. But there's the potential that some of the social games will start appealing to our consumers so we're making a lot of investments in that area.

"But the traditional companies - the Electronic Arts, or Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo or Disney - that make console-based video games, are going to really struggle [in future] to figure out how to get into these online business we're in today."

"There [was] so much built-up expertise at Blizzard when we did this merger (with Vivendi, ed.) - that we're now applying to Call Of Duty, Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero - that we otherwise wouldn't have had access to. That puts us in a much better position than many of the very console-dependant companies we used to compete against."