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MCV 14/08/09 27
MCV INTERVIEW SCOTT GUTHRIE, EVP & GM, MTV GAMES What is your vision for MTV Games now that you are in charge? We have a long-term plan, but as we are only in the formation stage right now I can’t really disclose it. But we do have a short term plan which is to execute as well as we can against The Beatles Rock Band. It represents a huge opportunity for not just MTV Games, but the whole Viacom enterprise. There is talk of the music game category being down in a revenue sense this year. What’s your take? There’s a few things going on there. The first and foremost is that we are transitioning as a category out of the ‘plastic’ area. Both MTV and our competitor [Activision] spent a lot of time getting instruments into households, and we’ve done a very good job. But the margins on hardware are small – so we are now transitioning into a software model. You see a revenue drop because we aren’t selling $149 bundles. But the business is really turning into two pieces
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There might not yet be any official tracking through NPD or ChartTrack of DLC, but it is a significant double-digit portion of our revenue stream. Scott Guthrie, MTV Games
Great
Scott
Two months ago MTV appointed THQ and Disney vet Scott Guthrie as head of its Games division, which includes the Rock Band brand. Here, in his first interview since taking the post, he talks to Michael French about MTV Games’ wider strategy, the power of DLC, and a little game called The Beatles Rock Band…
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– a focus on packaged software and also online. There might not be any official tracking through NPD or ChartTrack of the latter, but it is significant. DLC is a double-digit portion of our total revenue stream and grows month on month. While plastic isn’t as big a part of the revenue stream now, we have a much healthier market, expanding into new music genres. A great example is the introduction of our Country Music Track Pack – it was the biggest seller in the last year and a half. Our audience is interested in new genres, which in turn presents a lot of opportunities. So if you dig deeper beyond those top line numbers and you see it’s as healthy as it has ever been.