D.I.C.E. 07: Parla Phil Harrison

Intervista di rilasciata da pochissime ore.

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Qui nel dettaglio:

Some people were saying these questions were written in advance. Phil has never seen these questions. Phil thanks for doing this.

Thanks for indulging our little experiment here. Just backstage he said can you give me a little steer at the first question, and he just laughed at me. We can't talk about two things, I'm told. We can't talk about things that affect the stock price and we can't talk about my personal life. Which I found strange. No questions about my jail sentence or my stint in rehab.

In North America the price of the PS3 is $500 and $600, what kind of games will you have that will convince gamers to buy in at that price point?

Plenty is the short answer. Something that we've done in Europe is social aspect gaming, Singstar has sold over 7 million units and we're developing Singstar in PS3. I did bring a PS3 with a couple of game demos on it. If Ngai asked a bunch of boring questions, we could just play Motorstorm. We've got this concept of the Singstore, I can see a preview of the track, streamed off the server. Some of you will notice that we have background downloading now. [Applause]

You can save video performances.

[N'Gai points to the SingStar attract screen featuring a sunset.] Are those ducks flying by?

Yes, CELL rendered ducks. [Laughter.]

I can upload my video performance captured via a USB camera and other users can rate and review my performance. Thanks for letting me show this.

Do you have any examples of a users homepage?

You can see user info, themed weeks, who's the best Elvis singer this week. We call this "my SingStar", you can imagine this applying to a lot of products and services.

Do you think that kind of interface should be done on a game basis or on a higher level, like the friends section of the XMB?

This is I think the best integrated example we have. We do need to expose this to that layer of the XMB. We have some initiatives to move to that.

Many developers have said that Microsoft's support of development, from documentation to tools, has been better than Sony's. How does Sony plan to narrow this gap?

We can always provide better tools, documentation, service. I think its a myth that we provide documentation in Japanese. Many components were made all over the world. The CELL was made in Austin, Texas. We did in the past, in the PS1 days, work with Japanese documentation and translated docs from Japanese to English. We can always do better, its not something under my management, but we need to take those comments on board.

Programmers feel that while Sony platforms have more power, they feel that coding for them is generally a pain in the ass?

PlayStation One was the first platform to ship with an integrated OS, that integrated library, where we extracted the developer from the metal. They said, we want to work directly with the system. On PS2 we gave them access, they said no, we want the OS again! We want that abstraction. We are always struggling to get that right.

I think David Jaffe put it well, "You can have a development environment that does everything for you, but it will abstract you so much that you won't be able to get the full power of the machine."

The programmers that do the best work are the ones that like to get the deepest into the technology. That's why I think we have the right approach with the CELL design.

When Ken Kutaragi announced a PS3 worldwide release date in 06, why did Japanese developers still get special treatment in the form of dev kits?

That's not true. The first dev kits that were purely CELL based went to American developers.

I stand corrected.

EA also got a head start on dev kits. When is there going to be equal footing for all developers?

There was no preferential treatment. Some of the EA folks drove up from Redwood to get theirs from the office, so maybe they got them a little faster. [Phil defers to EA dev in the crowd for clarification.]

[Croal summarizes the audience member's comments] In his opinion he thinks the dev kits were equally distributed this time around.

The major distinction between PS2 and Xbox was that Xbox Live was superior than the roll your own approach Sony took with the online experience. Why didn't the PS3 online service match Xbox Live?

The day you buy the console is the start of a long term relationship that will evolve over time. The chipset stays the same, but the software will change over time. The features we have for delivering online content today, which are free of charge, are an open platform for developers to customize as they see fit. We'll add features over time.

My friends at Redmond say you can't offer the feature set because it's free.

No that's not true. While it may be free to the consumer, we know there are revenue streams for us to earn in other ways. We have a number of things that we'll announce shortly that will add clarity to that statement.

What do you see as the key features of Xbox Live and what is Sony's timetable for meeting those features?

PlayStation 3 shipped with content that delivered a pretty compelling online experience. Resistance 40-player multiplayer on day one was amazing. Thanks, Ted. Motorstorm is shipping in the next few weeks and someone has said that twelve player races in Motorstorm is as much fun as humans should be allowed to have with their clothes on.

What's the timetable for some of those features to the PSP?

We've got some interesting plans that we want to share at the right time.

Gabe Newell told Game Informer that "The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It's really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted. 'd say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a 'do over'. Just say, 'This was a horrible disaster and we're sorry and we're going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it.'"

It's a great quote.

He isn't the only developer who wanted me to ask you this. Why wasn't the launch postponed until many of the launch issues could have been resolved?

I have deep respect for Gabe's output, not so much for his comments in the press. He and his company have made two of the best games I've ever played. I have to ask this, though. By what measure is the launch unsuccessful? We had people lined up in stores in three continents for days. We sold everything we shipped into the marketplace. We continued to supply week after week. We have supplied more products in Japan, Asia and the US, and more software than we did for the PS1 and PS2. "What's wrong with this picture" is my view? We can always sell more, have more software.

The European launch is on track for the 23rd of March. The supply is on its way from China to European ports as we speak.

I just hope the Suez Canal doesn't get closed, otherwise we're all screwed.

When we announced the Emotion Engine, people said it would be too hot, too large, that we could never make it in high volume. People said the CELL would be too hot, it could never be made in volume. But we're exceeding targets.

Why do you think there's so much amneisa or skepticism in publishers and developers if that's the history?

I don't know. It baffles me. We haven't done a good enough job in sharing the issues with our stakeholders. But having said that, the challenges we had when launch PS1 and PS2 were quickly forgotten. I think we'll be the same on PS3.

With all the PSPs features why do you think it's taking so long for developers to create great, unique PSP expereinces?

I think we can go deeper, we can explore more capabilities of the machine, rather than borrowing trends in TVs and consoles.

What are you playing that's not on your platform?

Personal or professional? I've looked at many for competitive analysis. I was recently playing Loco Roco's next version. There's plenty of content on the PS3 and PSP to keep me entertained. Actually I've been playing a lot of this...

[Phil fires up duck demo. Super Rub A Dub.]

People say I have an unhealthy like of ducks. This is a title played entirely with the SIXAXIS. It requires no buttons. It will be available in a few weeks from the PlayStation Store.

One of the most powerful things about the PS3 is the "Install Other OS" option. It won't be Vista. It'll be Linux.

Do you have plans to have homebrew on the PSP?

The system doesn't really lend itself to having a secondary OS.

[N'Gai moves to questions from the audience.]

With Renderware off the market, and UE3 the de facto standard, is there any kind of alarm at Sony that you really need to start providing more compartmentalized tool sets?

Linux is for the non-professional game community, its not for games that will ship on the PlayStation Network or Blu-ray. It clearly takes time for developers to get all the functions of PS3, but if you look at Motorstorm, these distributed architectures work. As far as the rendering pipeline is concerned, there are other solutions besides Unreal Engine. If developers and publishers, don't want to use Unreal, don't buy it.



http://kotaku.com/gaming/sony/20-questions-with-phil-harrison-at-dice-235049.php