A few snippets from this Interview that can be found on http://metro.co.uk
This interview is pretty refreshing, as its not just softball question after softball question.
And the bonus:
Read the full interview here: http://metro.co.uk/2013/06/18/plays...icies-and-we-intend-to-stick-by-them-3845735/
This interview is pretty refreshing, as its not just softball question after softball question.
GC: I’ve been to a lot of E3 conferences but I’ve never seen anything like last night, with the chanting and the genuine… relief, not just happiness, from the crowd. Is that the response you expected, because the intensity of the reaction certainly seemed to take [PlayStation America boss] Jack Tretton by surprise. Which kind of implies even Sony didn’t quite appreciate just how important these issues were to people.
JR: It’s an interesting question. I’ve been attending these things for nigh on 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like it, for us or anybody else – platform holder or publisher. I think we were very confident in what we had to say, but I don’t think we were expecting quite the level of enthusiasm that manifested itself.
GC: The flipside of that euphoria though is that if you ever renege on any of that you’ll be crucified. Are you happy now for Sony in general, and the PlayStation division in particular, to be seen as… I can only paraphrase Andrew House at the end where he said, ‘We’re fighting for consumer rights’. Because that is not what you expect a global corporation to be saying and I just worry that some people within Sony might see these issues only as buzzwords or a temporary means of getting one up on your competitors.
JR: I can see why someone might put that interpretation on it, but if you look at the two… put aside the issue of price, which is a perfectly rational human reaction to a price that’s lower than that of our competitor. But if you take the two points that got everyone so excited when Jack was on stage – the used game policy and the need not to be always connected – those are things that we decided upon well before the furore of the last couple of weeks. Those are matters of policy that we determined were appropriate for our platform.
It’s interesting that you reference that last closing bit of Andy’s, I liked the bit where he spoke about have to gain or regain the trust of consumers. I thought that was very important, and you sort of mentioned the possibility that some of the stuff might be ephemeral – that there might be some small print somewhere – to the best of my knowledge, which I wouldn’t say is considerable but it’s probably as considerable as anybody’s, there isn’t any.
I mean who knows, some force majeure situation comes up years down the road – nothing’s forever necessarily – but these are our policies and we intend to stick by them.
GC: I wrote an editorial before E3 which warned readers that there are only two constants in the games industry: that companies never learn from their own, or anyone else’s, mistakes and that they always miss an open goal.
[Sustained and knowing laughter from both Jim Ryan and his PR handler]
GC: I think one of the reasons this situation seems so unusual is that a company, Sony in this instance, made neither of those common mistakes.
JR: Your editorial sounds somewhat cynical but if you based your observations on things that have happened in the past they’re not unreasonable. [laughs] But we have certainly learnt our lessons from the PS3. And there are a number things that occurred that time round that we do not intend to happen again. And I think some of the things that we’ve done in February and then again yesterday indicate that we have learnt those lessons.
GC: And in a similar manner there’s also a cycle of console manufacturer dominance, and publisher dominance as well, where a company does very well and it’s justifiably successful, and then it gets arrogant, and then it makes seemingly obvious – often anti-consumer – mistakes, then it does very badly, and then it realises its mistake, starts making an effort again, and the cycle repeats.
JR: You could be talking about Sony couldn’t you? [laughs]
GC: I’m only playing devil’s advocate! But genuinely I was very pleased with your announcements, purely from a consumer point of view and regardless even of whether you were talking about games or not. But what I also found interesting is that I would say on a game-by-game basis, particularly in terms of exclusives, Microsoft probably had the better of the two media briefings. And I can see an enormous caveat in that there seem to be a large number of first party Sony developers that haven’t announced anything yet for the PS4, but the fact that there isn’t an obvious killer app yet for the PlayStation 4 does seem to be your Achilles heel.
JR: First of all, in response to your observation that they had the better of it yesterday – which is understandable. It’s understandable… but I’m not saying I agree with it. I’d just point out that we unveiled a very large number of games at the February 20th event and at their equivalent launch event, for their own reasons – which may be perfectly good reasons – they did not focus so heavily on gaming. So obviously their powder was drier than our powder. But I think if you look at the piece cumulatively I would say we were at least competitive.
GC: Oh sure, I’m not suggesting you were very far behind. But my particular concern, which I may have voiced in February, is the nature of some of the titles that were announced. I just… again they’re not bad franchises per se but Killzone and inFamous just don’t seem to justify the level of prominence you’re giving them, given the quality and level of success of their predecessors.
JR: I’ll tell the developers you said that. [laughs]
GC: But again, I don’t want to pretend it’s a terrible game or anything. But… is this part of a bigger plan for your release schedule? I’d be perfectly okay with Killzone being merely the start of a constant stream of first party releases, but if it and inFamous are all we’re getting from Sony for the first six months…
JR: Yes…
GC: And before you say yes…
JR: I already did! [laughs]
GC: Before you try and convince me that the answer is yes all I’m thinking of is the launch of the 3DS, PS Vita, and Wii U where exactly the same things were implied and the very opposite was true…
JR: Well you know, 70 million PS3s probably says you we’ve got a pretty good chance of it. I think relative to the platforms you’ve just mentioned, when you look at the scale of consumer interest you look at the volume of pre-order business that’s been done. And some of that’s just people writing their name down on a form, but a lot of it’s people putting £50 down – so that’s serious intent.
I think, and I’ll be quite honest, who knows where it’ll end up in four or five years’ time but I think we’re going to get off to a damn good start and in this business momentum is all. If you get the momentum going and you get all the publishers and developers behind you, you might not be guaranteed success but you’ve got a very good chance.
GC: So you’re confident that that supply line of quality games is already in place? You won’t have a good launch and then nothing for six months?
JR: Not at all. And the statistic was quoted yesterday, I think it was 140 games in the first year. And the majority of those will come in the back end of 2014.
JR: Publishers are our major partners, we talk to them on a very regular basis – we listen to what they say. At the end of the day they have to provide an account to their shareholders and the single biggest factor that influences whether they make money, on either individual titles or a portfolio, is the size of the installed base that they’re publishing on. And that dwarfs everything else. If you get a spreadsheet out, which we obviously don’t have time for, I could demonstrate it to you.
So, yes there is a certain common knowledge that there is unhappiness within the publishing community over the fact that they do not participate in the second-hand business. However, if you offer any publisher a choice between an installed base of X – where X is a very large number – with the status quo on the second-hand disc-based model or 50 per cent of X and some sort of putative cut of the second-hand business I can predict with 100 per cent certainty what they would take.
GC: I must say the line-up on the PlayStation 3 last night was very impressive: only one sequel and an excellent diversity of other titles. Is that just an accident of where those games ended up or is that some kind of statement of intent for the breadth of titles you want for the PlayStation 4 as well?
JR: The PS2 we kept going for 13 years, we’re only seven in for PS3 so with an installed base of 70 million you’d be a fool not to want to publish to that still.
And the bonus:
GC: Good point, well thank you for your time. Oh, I forgot the obligatory Last Guardian question!
All: [laughs]
PR guy: You’re the first person to ask as well!
JR: We might have more news on that… no news this E3…
GC: It does still exist though? It hasn’t been cancelled?
PR guy: It does exist.
Read the full interview here: http://metro.co.uk/2013/06/18/plays...icies-and-we-intend-to-stick-by-them-3845735/
