Previously in the series: The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 2, The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 1, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 2, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 3, The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 2,The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 2
To wrapping things up with Scott Rohde, I asked the Sony Playstation exec to about the PS3’s main competition and the plans for motion-control games and Move, along with the possible future of the PSP.
I think everyone would have to agree that the $299 price point, and the slim redesign were the things that really reinvigorated people’s interest in the machine. But can you speak to a little bit about how developers maybe have maybe warmed up to it as well? I think at launch, the lead development for a lot of cross-platform games was happening on the Xbox 360. Anecdotally, I’m hearing that a lot of people are doing the opposite now. Can you speak to maybe why this shift might be happening?
Well, I think that, 360 was out to market first. So there’s a natural tendency for all multi-platform developers to establish themselves in that space and then have to move into the PS3 space. So that is where we started in this competition with our friends at Microsoft.
And that was probably a key part of their strategy.
Absolutely. Without a doubt. Now, over time, what happened was–we touted this over and over and it took some people longer than others to realize this–Playstation 3 is a very powerful machine with multiple processors. It takes a little bit of extra doing to pull the best out of the Playstation 3. But, once people peel back a couple layers, they start to realize how much power is still untapped in the machine, and that’s a very, very good feeling for a software developer.
When you’ve built a title, you’ve built an engine. Let’s just call it an engine, not even call it a title. You’ve built an engine and you’re two years into the life cycle of a hardware platform, and you realize, “Wow, my engineers are telling me that there’s a lot of horsepower I can still pull of here.” So, I can make my engine that much better over the next two, three, four, years. That’s a nice feeling to have as opposed to creating an engine and realizing, “Man, I’m pretty close to hitting my limits right away.”
With the competition, there’s a couple of different places where there are limitations, one of them being the space to store assets on the DVD as opposed to a Blu-ray. It’s night and day. So the natural assumption now is when you’re going in to build a new title, you would lead on the PS3, not only because it’s more powerful, but because there is so much more that you can store on the Blu-ray disc, and then you might have to take a subset of that and figure out what you can do on the competitions’ machines.
Which is their problem.
Yeah. [laughs]
Move is just out. Is it too soon to say that you guys face a little bit of skepticism, maybe? Some curiosity, too? How do you create positive buzz there? Because, honestly, Kinect is rolling out a few weeks after you guys. What are the selling points in your mind on Move right now?
OK, so, you’re talking to the right person. I have been personally involved with all the different technology that turned into the Playstation Move really from the get-go.
From EyeToy days?
Not from EyeToy days. Our London studio specialized in EyeToy games but Rick Marks was sort of the father of the EyeToy. He was heavily involved in the US in terms of helping to decide which technology we should use for the Playstation Move. We researched a lot of different technology and settled on this one for a number of different reasons.
I think we’ve kind of gone through a whole cycle with the EyeToy where you can only do so many things without holding a controller in your hand. There’s something, that tangible feeling of holding something in your hand, I firmly believe is key to a gaming experience. Can you have gaming experiences without that? Of course.