VG Aficionado
06-25-2007, 12:27 PM
Coming from a background in garage development, Phil Harrison has risen through the ranks to become one of the key players in Sony's Playstation empire. As head of the company's worldwide studios, Harrison is responsible for shaping Sony's in-house software on all its platforms.<<
PSP has entered the market and established an installed base, but software sales are not strong. What do developers need to do to create PSP content that's more compelling?
Well, whether you're talking about PS2, PS3, PSP, or any platform, it's to play to the strengths that the technology has and the differences that technology represents to the consumer. I think we've done that successfully in some titles and those have proven to be very successful. We can always do more to exploit the portable nature of PSP; we can do more to exploit the mobile, Wi-Fi, web connectivity of the machine. You can look at titles that have that very well - Monster Hunter Portable in Japan is a great example. This is a title that has really taken advantage of what PSP is about., and it sold over one million units. I wouldn't agree that the software sales have been unsatisfactory, but I do agree that we can always do more to take advantage of the machine's capabilities.
You're beta testing the Home online service right now. Will it have all the features that have been talked about and shown so far when it launches?
And some more. We're obviously in beta trial right now, and so it's very difficult for me to make very definitive statements. Part of the purpose of a beta trial is to work with an extended audience of real users in the community to find out what works and what doesn't, what they like and don't like. Some things that we thought were really important have resonated less strongly with users and the inverse - things we hadn't considered important the users love...We're starting to see some really valuable feedback from the user base. We're very pleased with the progress so far and the way the technology and infrastructure is scaling out. I think by the time we get to September, we'll be able to make some definitive statements as to exactly the content that's going to be in the deployed service day one.
Could you give an example of something you thought would be important but has been ignored by the users? Or vice versa, something you thought was a minor detail but they are really excited about?
It's too early to really share those details. I don't mean to evade your question, but I don't think we've gotten all the answers we're looking for yet. But I think clearly the functions of communication between users are what people love. That's not necessarily a surprise, but we'll look to increasing the sophistication of the methods of communication.
Do you expect Home to be launched sometime this year?
We have said that, if the beta trial is successful, that the service will go live in October. I'm only two weeks into that beta period right now, but nothing changed our outlook.
One area in which Sony has succeeded in the past is platform exclusives. But recently, many traditional Playstation exclusives have gone to Xbox 360 as well - Virtua Fighter, Grand Theft Auto, and Devil May Cry, for example. Is there anything you can do to combat this trend, or is the era of exclusives coming to an end?
Well, from a third-party exclusive point of view, that doesn't fall under my remit, because I'm looking after Worldwide Studios and our first-party output. But, obviously, I'm looking at the platform as an entire portfolio. And yes, I'm always concerned to make sure that consumers can buy the best games and get the best game experiences to validate their system purchase. as long as the games they get are great, [consumers] don't care if they are third-party or first-party...What I do believe is that the investments we have made in Worldwide Studios globablly - U.S., Europe, and Japan - will yield the best quality software and the highest quality experiences that are clearly going to be exclusive to the platform...We have a larger platform-dedicated development resource than our competitors combined. So all of that goes towards the fact that the best games with the best technology are coming exclusively to [Sony] platforms.
[B]You'd announced that Sony was going to share technology and resources between all their worldwide studios for PS3 development. To what scale is that occuring right now?
Every game on PS3 has some degree of shared technology internally. There are no games that are islands in our portfolio. We have a common online functionality, we have a common sound engine, we have a common graphics engine, we have a common low-level rendering, which are used variously by different titles. What we did at GDC was announce that we were taking large portions of that technology base we were easy to support and sharing that with our third parties, in a program we call Playstation Edge, which is taking the highest performing low-level libraries that we have on the platform and making them available for developers.
Playstation 3 has been positioned as a very powerful, high-end machine. One problem you have right now is that we haven't seen any games thus far that look like they couldn't be done on Xbox 360. When do you think we'll see games hit the market that showcase the PS3 over and above what the 360 can do?
Well, I would take exception to your analysis. I think we do have titles that illustrate the point of difference that PS3 brings, both in terms of gameplay and underlying game technology. There are things we're demonstrating onscreen in games like Motorstorm, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Formula 1 that cannot be done on any other system. All three of those are launch window titles. Now, it's always dangerous to judge any stem by its launch lineup...You only have to go back to the games that launched Playstation 1 and Playstation 2. If you took those few dozen titles and analyzed them, you would never have imagined that either of those formats would have on to sell over 100 million units each.
From an American gamer's perspective, more and more of your Triple-A titles are coming from the U.S. and Europe, where in the past, more of them came from Japan. Does that represent a shift of power within Sony?
I think that it was a conscious strategy to build strong development organizations in every geographical area of operations. Because - as we've seen with the music business and the fil business - locally produced repertoire accounts for a large percentage of local sales. If you look at the music business in France, about 75 percent of the records sold in France are from French artists. And, although the games industry is probably more global than any other form of entertainment, in order to grow the industry, we have to create local entertainment experiences. That doesn't mean we've de-emphaszied Japan. We have this reasonably successful billion-dollar IP called Gran Turismo that you might be familiar with. That's obviously a major force in the market whenever that title is shipping. Any iteration of the Gran Turismo franchise has become a global event. Our Everybody's Golf series, known as Hot Shots in the States, has been very successful. And a title that is coming out in 2008, called Shirokishi [a.k.a. White Knight Story], which is an amazing RPG [with] very rich and deep online features., I think will be a global hit as well.http://www.gamesey.com/page.php?t=1304
PSP has entered the market and established an installed base, but software sales are not strong. What do developers need to do to create PSP content that's more compelling?
Well, whether you're talking about PS2, PS3, PSP, or any platform, it's to play to the strengths that the technology has and the differences that technology represents to the consumer. I think we've done that successfully in some titles and those have proven to be very successful. We can always do more to exploit the portable nature of PSP; we can do more to exploit the mobile, Wi-Fi, web connectivity of the machine. You can look at titles that have that very well - Monster Hunter Portable in Japan is a great example. This is a title that has really taken advantage of what PSP is about., and it sold over one million units. I wouldn't agree that the software sales have been unsatisfactory, but I do agree that we can always do more to take advantage of the machine's capabilities.
You're beta testing the Home online service right now. Will it have all the features that have been talked about and shown so far when it launches?
And some more. We're obviously in beta trial right now, and so it's very difficult for me to make very definitive statements. Part of the purpose of a beta trial is to work with an extended audience of real users in the community to find out what works and what doesn't, what they like and don't like. Some things that we thought were really important have resonated less strongly with users and the inverse - things we hadn't considered important the users love...We're starting to see some really valuable feedback from the user base. We're very pleased with the progress so far and the way the technology and infrastructure is scaling out. I think by the time we get to September, we'll be able to make some definitive statements as to exactly the content that's going to be in the deployed service day one.
Could you give an example of something you thought would be important but has been ignored by the users? Or vice versa, something you thought was a minor detail but they are really excited about?
It's too early to really share those details. I don't mean to evade your question, but I don't think we've gotten all the answers we're looking for yet. But I think clearly the functions of communication between users are what people love. That's not necessarily a surprise, but we'll look to increasing the sophistication of the methods of communication.
Do you expect Home to be launched sometime this year?
We have said that, if the beta trial is successful, that the service will go live in October. I'm only two weeks into that beta period right now, but nothing changed our outlook.
One area in which Sony has succeeded in the past is platform exclusives. But recently, many traditional Playstation exclusives have gone to Xbox 360 as well - Virtua Fighter, Grand Theft Auto, and Devil May Cry, for example. Is there anything you can do to combat this trend, or is the era of exclusives coming to an end?
Well, from a third-party exclusive point of view, that doesn't fall under my remit, because I'm looking after Worldwide Studios and our first-party output. But, obviously, I'm looking at the platform as an entire portfolio. And yes, I'm always concerned to make sure that consumers can buy the best games and get the best game experiences to validate their system purchase. as long as the games they get are great, [consumers] don't care if they are third-party or first-party...What I do believe is that the investments we have made in Worldwide Studios globablly - U.S., Europe, and Japan - will yield the best quality software and the highest quality experiences that are clearly going to be exclusive to the platform...We have a larger platform-dedicated development resource than our competitors combined. So all of that goes towards the fact that the best games with the best technology are coming exclusively to [Sony] platforms.
[B]You'd announced that Sony was going to share technology and resources between all their worldwide studios for PS3 development. To what scale is that occuring right now?
Every game on PS3 has some degree of shared technology internally. There are no games that are islands in our portfolio. We have a common online functionality, we have a common sound engine, we have a common graphics engine, we have a common low-level rendering, which are used variously by different titles. What we did at GDC was announce that we were taking large portions of that technology base we were easy to support and sharing that with our third parties, in a program we call Playstation Edge, which is taking the highest performing low-level libraries that we have on the platform and making them available for developers.
Playstation 3 has been positioned as a very powerful, high-end machine. One problem you have right now is that we haven't seen any games thus far that look like they couldn't be done on Xbox 360. When do you think we'll see games hit the market that showcase the PS3 over and above what the 360 can do?
Well, I would take exception to your analysis. I think we do have titles that illustrate the point of difference that PS3 brings, both in terms of gameplay and underlying game technology. There are things we're demonstrating onscreen in games like Motorstorm, Resistance: Fall of Man, and Formula 1 that cannot be done on any other system. All three of those are launch window titles. Now, it's always dangerous to judge any stem by its launch lineup...You only have to go back to the games that launched Playstation 1 and Playstation 2. If you took those few dozen titles and analyzed them, you would never have imagined that either of those formats would have on to sell over 100 million units each.
From an American gamer's perspective, more and more of your Triple-A titles are coming from the U.S. and Europe, where in the past, more of them came from Japan. Does that represent a shift of power within Sony?
I think that it was a conscious strategy to build strong development organizations in every geographical area of operations. Because - as we've seen with the music business and the fil business - locally produced repertoire accounts for a large percentage of local sales. If you look at the music business in France, about 75 percent of the records sold in France are from French artists. And, although the games industry is probably more global than any other form of entertainment, in order to grow the industry, we have to create local entertainment experiences. That doesn't mean we've de-emphaszied Japan. We have this reasonably successful billion-dollar IP called Gran Turismo that you might be familiar with. That's obviously a major force in the market whenever that title is shipping. Any iteration of the Gran Turismo franchise has become a global event. Our Everybody's Golf series, known as Hot Shots in the States, has been very successful. And a title that is coming out in 2008, called Shirokishi [a.k.a. White Knight Story], which is an amazing RPG [with] very rich and deep online features., I think will be a global hit as well.http://www.gamesey.com/page.php?t=1304