Sony's Phil Harrison’s Post-TGS Musings
Blu-ray installed ‘purely from a game design point of view’.
The guys over at GamePro were lucky enough to grab a few minutes with SCEE’s main man Phil Harrison following a successful Tokyo Game Show for Sony this past weekend.
Harrison noted that there has been a significant improvement in the numerous PS3 games which were on show at TGS, but also stresses that the company is far from resting on its laurels, telling the interviewer: “…we've got a long way to go. I don't want anyone to walk out of here thinking that these games are 'it'. We're still tuning, improving, tweaking performance.”
When asked what Sony has, as a company, that Microsoft doesn't, Harrison replies: “We've had a couple of accusations of sounding arrogant. So I've been very careful about answering that question…One of the things that we do have, and we would never rely upon it, but we do have 200 million plus PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 sales worldwide. And that gives us a very loyal fanbase, who we could never upset and never take advantage of, but it gives us some fans who love what we do, and push us really hard to do the best that we can do. And they have been pushing us. I read the forums, and the newsgroups -- possibly some of the same ones that you read. And we've had some justifiable criticisms, and I won't try to defend that."
He continues: “We've also got industry support, we've got worldwide studios as you've seen today, who are doing some incredible stuff and really leading the charge in making the PlayStation 3 shine as much as it can. And that makes a difference…We have 14 studios worldwide and about 2200 people at last count, and all of those studios share common technology, common tools, and that really helps.”
Harrison then remembers to include an all-important nest-featherer: “What else do we have? Ken Kutaragi! We have somebody who is visionary and equally brutal in his demands that we achieve that vision. Which is...sometimes a challenge, but never a dull moment, you know?”
When asked what he has to say to gamers who don’t care about Blu-ray movies but would rather have a cheaper console instead, Harrison tried carefully to outline Sony’s take on this oft-heard criticism of Sony’s PS3 strategy, replying: “That's a great question. I can understand that. There's this sort of misunderstanding that the Blu-ray disc player for movies is somehow burdening the console with unnecessary cost. That is completely not true. We put our Blu-ray Disc functionality in the console purely from a game design point of view. Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray Disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent.”
“So games like Resistance which, as a launch title, is up to 20-something gigabytes already. And that's day one -- think about four years, six years from now. We'll be pushing the 50 gigabyte limit with dual-layer Blu-ray very quickly. So we absolutely need it as game designers, and in that regard, the consumer is getting the movie functionality effectively for free.”
Well, hardly ‘free’ Phil, but we get the gist.
Harrison noted that there has been a significant improvement in the numerous PS3 games which were on show at TGS, but also stresses that the company is far from resting on its laurels, telling the interviewer: “…we've got a long way to go. I don't want anyone to walk out of here thinking that these games are 'it'. We're still tuning, improving, tweaking performance.”
When asked what Sony has, as a company, that Microsoft doesn't, Harrison replies: “We've had a couple of accusations of sounding arrogant. So I've been very careful about answering that question…One of the things that we do have, and we would never rely upon it, but we do have 200 million plus PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 sales worldwide. And that gives us a very loyal fanbase, who we could never upset and never take advantage of, but it gives us some fans who love what we do, and push us really hard to do the best that we can do. And they have been pushing us. I read the forums, and the newsgroups -- possibly some of the same ones that you read. And we've had some justifiable criticisms, and I won't try to defend that."
He continues: “We've also got industry support, we've got worldwide studios as you've seen today, who are doing some incredible stuff and really leading the charge in making the PlayStation 3 shine as much as it can. And that makes a difference…We have 14 studios worldwide and about 2200 people at last count, and all of those studios share common technology, common tools, and that really helps.”
Harrison then remembers to include an all-important nest-featherer: “What else do we have? Ken Kutaragi! We have somebody who is visionary and equally brutal in his demands that we achieve that vision. Which is...sometimes a challenge, but never a dull moment, you know?”
When asked what he has to say to gamers who don’t care about Blu-ray movies but would rather have a cheaper console instead, Harrison tried carefully to outline Sony’s take on this oft-heard criticism of Sony’s PS3 strategy, replying: “That's a great question. I can understand that. There's this sort of misunderstanding that the Blu-ray disc player for movies is somehow burdening the console with unnecessary cost. That is completely not true. We put our Blu-ray Disc functionality in the console purely from a game design point of view. Once we had that storage capacity on Blu-ray Disc, adding the movie playback functionality was extremely cost-effective, [the cost] is actually non-existent.”
“So games like Resistance which, as a launch title, is up to 20-something gigabytes already. And that's day one -- think about four years, six years from now. We'll be pushing the 50 gigabyte limit with dual-layer Blu-ray very quickly. So we absolutely need it as game designers, and in that regard, the consumer is getting the movie functionality effectively for free.”
Well, hardly ‘free’ Phil, but we get the gist.
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Comments
SCiARA 25 Sep 2006 16:19
1/5
“So games like Resistance which, as a launch title, is up to 20-something gigabytes already. And that's day one -- think about four years, six years from now. We'll be pushing the 50 gigabyte limit with dual-layer Blu-ray very quickly. So we absolutely need it as game designers, and in that regard, the consumer is getting the movie functionality effectively for free.”
*COUGH*BOLLOX*COUGH*
*COUGH*BOLLOX*COUGH*
OptimusP 25 Sep 2006 17:52
2/5
I concur, what kind of lazy-ass, sloppy-retard developer you got to be to make 20 gigs of generic crap we played a bazilion times in the last freakin decade.
ooh ooh, fight alien invaders....again! with guns that have secondary functions...again...all it needs now is a some kind of grav-gun to prove it's originality as a game.
ooh ooh, fight alien invaders....again! with guns that have secondary functions...again...all it needs now is a some kind of grav-gun to prove it's originality as a game.
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vault 13 26 Sep 2006 01:27
3/5
OptimusP wrote:
..all it needs now is a some kind of grav-gun to prove it's originality as a game.
So all Half-Life 2 was to you a generic FPS with a grav-gun?
hollywooda 26 Sep 2006 09:02
4/5
this whole ressistance game being soooo large it has to fit on a blu-ray disc stinks of bullshit, i bet when it comes out u can still sit down & complete it in a wkend... there's no way a game can take up that amount of space.
SCiARA 26 Sep 2006 09:07
5/5
The only way it’s that big is if it’s stuffed full of HD cut scenes or their not compressing data properly
PC's have been doing "HD Gaming" for years and they seem to manage well enough
PC's have been doing "HD Gaming" for years and they seem to manage well enough