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MCV 11/06/10 65 ALAIN FALC, CEO, BIG BEN INTERACTIVE MCV INTERVIEW Thinking
What can attendees expect to see on the BigBen stand at E3? Will there be any new products? We are keeping most products secret but we can say that we’re going to show a new Wii Remote for children. This is a very specific design and something completely new.
The Wii is the biggest console on the market, but it’s in decline. Has the Wii bubble popped? Yes, although we think this year will still be very good for Wii – of course console sales will decline and that’s also the case for the Wii Remote, Nunchuck and other peripherals.
The price of the console is going down so more and more people will buy unofficial peripherals, as less people want to pay full price for accessories. We’re also waiting for the next generation of Wii and hope it will be soon.
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Will you prepare new accessories if and when the Wii 2 is announced? Yes. The thing with Nintendo is this kind of thing is difficult as they are very, very secretive about new developments but we are sure each time there is a new console, that we are always ready to be the first on the market.
For example with the original DS, BigBen was the only company to prepare a complete range of accessories when it launched. It’s very important for our
development and marketing teams to be first to market.
Do the motion controllers Natal and Move present new opportunities? For us we think Move is a next-gen version of the Wii Remote – it will allow us to open up and make a lot of new accessories, like the Wii did. There will be a lot of opportunity to make chargers, devices such as tennis racquets and a lot of other things. We have even developed some games for Move behind closed doors which will likely launch next year.
The difference with Project Natal is that accessories are no use to it. It’s a very good system because you can play exercise games and fighting games but you don’t need accessories.
The UK market is competitive but we don’t want to copy others. We have strong market share because we make the best products.
Alain Falc, BigBen Interactive
Big Ben Interactive is a major player in the European accessories market and is expanding across the US and UK. Dominic Sacco speaks to CEO Alain Falc about its future plans including Move and iPhone games…
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What are the challenges of expanding in the economic climate? What we are always trying to do is to come up with new innovative products. One example of this is Cyberbike which connects to the Wii and acts as an exercise bike. It was a very big success in a few countries at Christmas but we only manufactured 20,000 units and it was the first time we had no idea of the success of a product. The demand ended up being five or six times more than expected and it is possible we will bring this to the US. We have a very big company who is interested in distributing the product there this Christmas. We will produce at least 150,000 more units in Europe.
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How does the UK compare to the European market? It is more competitive
but we don’t want to
AIMING HIGH: CEO Alain Falc wants BigBen to be the world’s leading accessories brand
compete on products by copying others. We have strong market share because we’re doing the best products, the best quality, first delivery and best service for the stock delivery. We try to understand the distribution in each territory and help retailers to have profit with our products – this is the most important thing for us.
You have product licenses such as Marvel and Hello Kitty. What do you look for in a licensing partner? They must be very popular because 80 to 90 per cent of consumers will buy normal peripherals without any license, so the market is only 10 to 20 per cent – which is why there is no space in
stores for 20 different licenses. This is why we have to select the best ones. This year it’s Hello Kitty and Marvel and maybe next year it could be a different license. We don’t want to make ten licensed products as it would kill the range.
Have you got any plans for the iPhone and iPad? Yes we have produced a range of iPhone accessories which launched last month. We have seen success in the French market and now hope to extend this across Europe. We have also prepared apps including small casual games. We have to enter this market to learn from it.
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