Bringing PlayStation Back to Basics

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So if you're asking me from a World Wide Studios point of view, I don't make games for any other platform, so from my point of view that's an opportunity, because it means that I can have greater market share and greater share of voice with the titles that we do make. From an overall platform point of view, I think the combination of World Wide Studios titles and the smart, strategic investment of key third parties is more than enough to stimulate demand for our systems.

A lot of people have been surprised by the Wii. Have you been personally surprised by the uptake of the Nintendo Wii?

Yeah, I don't remember reading anybody's analysis that called this route two years ago or even a year ago to 18 months ago, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. We work in an entertainment business, basically, and entertainment has elements of fashion, and it has elements of the latest cool thing. If that stimulates interest in the videogame business and causes more people to play games, causes more people to go into retail stores and buy games, causes retailers to dedicate more shelf space to the category, and causes game developers and publishers to have a better macroeconomic foundation for their business, that's a win-win for everybody, best of all for the end consumer. It's a virtuous cycle.

And it's really good for Nintendo.

Sure.

It seems that both Sony and Microsoft often look at the Nintendo Wii and say, "oh yeah, Wii's great, its success is really good for the industry." Those kinds of compliments don't happen too often between Microsoft and Sony. Can you equally recognize the success that Microsoft has had?

It would be churlish to try and suggest that you would wish ill on any company, because as I said, if the business has got a lot of momentum and it's aggressively acquiring new users, new forms of creativity are being accepted in the marketplace and the kind of games that we can make as creators gets wider, that's a great thing from a game designer point of view, from a game creating organization. That's incredibly empowering because it means that people's minds are more open to new challenges. In the 16-bit and the 8-bit era on 8-bit Nintendo and 16-bit Genesis and Nintendo, it was all about 2D platformers, some sports and that was it. And that's a pretty boring place to be.

What do you consider the biggest factor in the PS3 overtaking Xbox 360, if that's destined to happen?

First of all, we don't look at it in terms of short term notches, where we're trying to overtake that particular product or in that particular market. We just look at it in terms of a longer-term strategy. It actually reverts back to the earlier discussion about what we should be doing in our business to be the creative choice of the developers and the commercial choice of the publishers. If, as a game development studio, we can create the most compelling experiences that showcase our platforms in the most interesting way, that generate the most fun games for people to play, people will buy our systems. Now that has to be linked to great marketing, great promotion, the right price points, the kind of rising tide of Blu-ray disc adoption and an increasing adoption of networks. But those things will be fine. They'll all take care of themselves, but we just need to stay focused on building the right game content, bringing those to our systems, and then I'm pretty happy that everything else will fall into place.

So you feel that the PlayStation business is focused right now.

Yeah, I think so. You can see the games that we're releasing this year and you can jump forward 18 months and imagine what their sequels are going to be like. You can see the games that we've got coming out in 2008. Again we've got some incredible powerhouse titles. So yeah, we're just going to stick to our guns.

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