GC '07 Q&A: SCEE's David Reeves

LEIPZIG, Germany--Sony announced a number of new services and technology at its packed press conference to kick off this year's Games Convention Wednesday.

Among these was Play TV, which will give gamers the option of turning their PlayStation 3s into video recorders, and which will be launching in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France in 2008. Also, the PSP will be getting Go!Explore, which will add a satellite navigation system for walking and driving with the handheld.

After the event, GameSpot spoke to David Reeves, SCEE president, to get some extra info on what Sony has planned this year.

GameSpot UK: Can you talk us through your Leipzig strategy?

David Reeves: Yes. What we were trying to do at Leipzig was make a step change and to make it more international. I did the first Leipzig six years ago, and we did it all in German, and we did a German market update, and it was totally local German, and a little bit for Austria, a little bit for Switzerland. This year we took the decision that Leipzig would become international and that we would do the presentation in English, and we would have a German flavour to it, which I think you saw at the end, and I think it went down quite well.

Internationally, now, we essentially have three major conferences for us: E3, in July, and which I don't know what's going to happen to that next year; and we have Leipzig in August; and then we have the Tokyo Game Show in a month's time. And what we find is... you cannot put all a company's announcements into one show. So, we have communicated together, and we decided that, for example, this time 'round, we would do it in English but with a German touch, we would announce a balance. We would not necessarily show new games, but show the games on the floor, because this is a consumer show.

There are going to be 200,000 people here, and more than half of them are probably going to be German. But at the same time, the games are going to come out, and we're only going to show the games that are coming out before Christmas that we're absolutely sure of and are really polished. But then we would announce services, particularly for PSP and PS3, which would be coming out in January or February. And that was our strategy.

We're deliberating not launching these services before Christmas, because we think it will be too crowded. You know, people haven't got their heads 'round the services, so concentrate on software. But we know that for January, February--for example, the TV tuner is coming to PS3, video download service in the UK, Go!Messenger everywhere. That was our strategy, and it could be then that coming into Tokyo Game Show, that there are going to be other things.

At E3, Phil Harrison got up and talked a lot about Home. We're not ignoring Home, but it's in the beta-test phase, so it might be next time 'round that Phil or Kaz Hirai will get up and talk about that.

We didn't talk too much about Killzone, or LittleBigPlanet. We could have shown it but it would have been in the same state--it's not, of course--but it takes developers a long time to produce a demo just for one show.

So, in summary, it's a big advantage for us to have these three shows.

GSUK: I think some people were expecting an update on Home since it was a European title. Will that now be in Tokyo?

DR: I think that you'll get more information at Tokyo simply because we're really still in the beta-testing phase. We're getting a lot of information back; we're not backtracking on it at all. It's just that if we're going to announce something, as we did with some of these services, we want to be able to tell you what the launch date is, what it's going to contain, and what the price is going to be--well, in case of Home, it's not a price, it's what the rates will be--and so it might be Tokyo Game Show, it might be after. We want to do it when it's absolutely right and not in a half-cocked way.

GSUK: What was the thinking behind launching Play TV? There are a lot of devices on the Mac and PC that do that kind of thing.

DR: Why do we want to do it? Well, first of all, we do believe that people want a good screen, a good mobile device, and that's why it's now slim and light, and to have a whole range of content.

But what you're getting here is not just something that will play Sky-aggregated content, but you have a games machine as well, and you can browse the Web. So we think that is a tremendous, unique selling point. Why did we choose Sky? We chose Sky because they are superb content aggregators. We are not. That is not our skill set.

We obviously have Sony Pictures and we have Sony BMG, but that's only a small part of the industry. Sky is able to call on content from everywhere...and they are great on customer service. So that's why we formed a joint venture with them, and your next question might well be "well, what are you going to do outside UK and Ireland?"--and yes, we're talking to other content aggregators in other countries in order to do the same service on PSP.

GSUK: There is a small issue with memory on the PSP, though. How are people going to fit all this media content on to their PSPs?

DR: Remember that probably an 8GB memory stick by around Christmas is going to be about 100 euros. I'm not sure what 8GB would take exactly, but it would probably be up to 20 movies or something like that, so I don't think it's really going to be a problem. People have got into the habit now of carrying memory sticks around. I have a small bag that I take with me, and I have all my memory sticks in there and they're all labeled. People like to just put them in, a presentation here, a movie there, and watch it on the plane or wherever...

GSUK: There were some rumours of introducing force feedback into the Sixaxis controller. Is that happening?

DR: We picked up today on some of the Web sites that people were talking about that in Japan, but we don't have any announcements about it at all.

GSUK: Can you tell us about the plan and the pricing strategy for Buzz!TV?

DR: I don't think we've actually fine-tuned the pricing. I understand there's going to be not just content that we will provide, but there's then going to be user-generated content, which I think will actually long-term be the way to go.

So we're in the process now, as we did with PlayStation Network, of actually interviewing people and doing some research to see what the right pricing structure is. We have several routes we could go. We can go what we call "penetration pricing," which means we have it in there as kind of a loss leader [a marketing technique where a product is sold at a loss to encourage other, more profitable, sales]. We can go balanced pricing, which means we match what our development costs are. Or we can go premium pricing, if we think it's a superb piece of content.

So the research is ongoing, and the good thing about doing it in a network base is that you can almost--with 48 hours' notice--you can put the pricing up, you can change it, you can even vary it from people buying it at the weekend to people buying it in the week, things like that.

GSUK: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue will be out before the end of 2007. Are we now looking at a 2008 release for the full game?

DR: We are. I think we have gone public and said 2008, so I don't think I'm giving anything away. For the Prologue, we've got to get it in the stores and on the network before December 15, and that's what we're going to do.

GSUK: Is Go!Messenger going to be subscription-based or available for a one-off fee?

DR: There will probably in some countries be a small subscription fee to run it. In other countries, it could possibly be free. But you appreciate BT have set it up and they've done most of the software, and they will now be subcontracting it to other people. I don't exactly know, but just as an example, France Telecom, T-Mobile, companies in Spain, and maybe Australia, so that it does become worldwide. And that's why we chose BT, because they have these contacts.

GSUK: The focus for games was very much on 2007. Where does that leave Sony for 2008?

DR: As I said before, I think [there'll be more about that] at Tokyo Game Show, or maybe there's going to be other events that maybe the Americans put on early next year, because between January and July it's more than six months, so I think they have a Gamers' Day? Or Destination PlayStation. I think you're going to see some of the games coming out there. Remember that it's basically Phil Harrison and Worldwide Studios, and they're going to say, "I'm now going to show you LittleBigPlanet," or "This is the next version of Killzone."

As I say, we haven't changed our strategy, but it's more of a drip feed to make sure that when you see it, people say, "That is superb," rather then just put it out and it's 20 percent finished.

GSUK: Thanks for your time.