E3 Video Q&A: Peter Dille on the new PS3 strategy

I actually knew a ton of people who wanted to buy a ps3 for FF13, and this guys saying that it doesn't matter....and hes the senior marketing VP. I'm surprised (and shocked)

The answers don't feel very honest... but what can you expect from the vice president of marketing.

I know at least 5 or 6 people that were going to buy a ps3 when ff13 came out. I don't think sony realizes how bad that was for them.

@ Ardiendo_1 "In all serious though, MS have been a lot better at sticking to their release dates (with exclusives) than Sony this gen, so hopefully the wad of cash Square picked up from them will speed things along." What? You're joking right? I have been waiting for Alan Wake forever.

I agree losing FFXIII exclusivity to the 360 'on the day and date' is no big deal considering that date seems like it will never come. In all serious though, MS have been a lot better at sticking to their release dates (with exclusives) than Sony this gen, so hopefully the wad of cash Square picked up from them will speed things along.

OMG! I just hit around 10 walls of text all written by die hard fanboys. Why can't we just all get along and get a PC?

Why does it seem all the articles are crossed linked to each other. De ja vu.

Looks like I will be checking this one out , too.

@Grantsplace2004 "The xbox wasn't nearly the software giant PS2 was, so its excuseable for them to use software to ensure partial backward compatibility on the 360. I owned an xbox and besides Halo and a couple other games I can't think of anything I'd play again. However, by Sony taking out backward compatibility for the PS3, they are alienating the majority of gamers from the previous generation who still want to play their old games and have PS2s that are suffering from old age. I, myself, don't care that much about bc, possibly owing to my owning a 360, but I can't help but notice how deliciously ironic it is that Sony, who pride themselves, and rightly so, on longevity of their products, are so quick to rid themselves of the previous generations games." You can't just apply different standards when there is a direct parallel between two things. Your post was more of what I was talking about: you just made excuses why it is ok for Microsoft to only have partial software emulation while Sony is criticized for doing so. Your excuse that "Xbox wasn't nearly the software giant PS2 was" is pitiful. The fact is, Xbox became a very successful platform last generation with many, many great games. I have as many Xbox games as PS2 games left over from last generation that I want to continue playing in the future. The fact that the 360 lacked full BC was a disappointment to me, just as I would be disappointed in the new 80GB PS3's lack of PS2 BC if I didn't already own a PS3 that does support near full BC. I understand people's disappointment that the new SKU will not have BC for PS2 games and I don't think it is a good decision by Sony. The point I made was that Sony's explanation was no different than the one given by Microsoft and so was not deserving of being called out or implied as something only Sony was guilty of. The longevity of Sony platforms that you mentioned doesn't necessarily have to do with BC. It has to do with the fact that Sony continues to support those consoles with games and marketing. A fact that Sony should be commended for. You mentioned owning a Xbox 360 but I wonder if you own a PS3. I do own both a PS3 and an Xbox 360 so my opinions of each system are based on experience. Nowhere in my post did I ignore relevant facts. For example, I mentioned that it IS a loss for Sony that FFXIII has gone multi-platform. I just believe that many Xbox fanboys are jumping on that and overexaggerting its importance.

Tru Born4This but you also have to remember this is SONY AMERICA we cant include Japan or any other country because then the situation takes on too many variables. The man is an employee of SONY America and for all his paycheck cares about is how Sony America is doing Sony stomps on xbox 360 jp but E3 and the U.S. isnt concerned about that they want to make sure Sony gets a strong foothold in the US. The 360 in JP is basically a self filler, sony america does not want that to happen in the US. The Japanese are loyal people and will stick to their own products, us Americans since 1776 have been back stabbers and will turn our backs on anything for the more appealing product (not better per se more appealing)

idksparda21 you only show ignorance when you accuse people A. of being fan boys. & B. do not explain your statement, not to mention bad sentence structuring

Although I agree that it is this mans job for damage control and his comment on not being fazed by the loss of FFXIII was seemingly retarded... but many have to remember that on the whole, Sony spends the majority of their effort entertaining people in Japan and in Japan, the XBOX doesn't have a foot to stand on. the fact that FF on 360 will NOT be released in Japan just drives home how many at sony are not too worried about FF because they know the majority of MILLIONS of PS3 owners in Japan will buy it and they'll get their monies worth, not to mention all the people who have already bought a PS3 in preparation for this game and add any additional who just end up buying a PS3 and this game, granted it won't be as much as they hoped for and Sony may never fully take hold as a strong console here in america, they've conquered Japan and in the end, that's where a lot of their money comes from anyway... I could be wrong but if I was a sony exec, that's what I'd be thinking... FF was a saving grace for PS3 in america only... They're safe ALMOST everywhere, in particular Japan... again this is all just IMO... for all I know, every sony exec could be crying themselves to sleep tonight... just food for thought..,

wow these posts here prove how really fanboys are very stupid

Lol LIAR he made the mistake of comparing GTA 4 360 to PS3 A. Xbox 360 Kills in GTA sales while PS3 GTA jus floats around..... PS3 is more than upset over FF13 his job is damage control that was what this whole article was about. PPL without a 360 hardrive most often arent the ones online, and buying videos 4 the PS3 will be more expensive than renting from xbox live especially since they dont have a net flix service (which I believe is an affordable monthly fee) Like Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) it loses to xbox cuz they don't have a stable service based system. And i bet sony spent more money to keep their scarce exclusives like MGS4 than 360 did on GTA 4 or FF13 because 3rd parties want more money and will always make deals to produce games on multiple copies. After GTA 4 360 success FF13 may have been as cheap as a $15 dollar trade in at your nearest gamestop. I wish Sony would stop sounding so arrogant i think that is their main problem, and gamers dont like it. Sony keeps on yappin about how they want to make current PS2 users to the PS3 well not having backwards capabilities its the wrong approach especially when wii has this function and the 360 to a certain extent. Every time Sony opens its mouth its an exaggeration or contradiction. From Sony's press conference they really didnt have anything that the 360 wont hav nd more ill give them resistance lil big planet looks interesting but gimmicky other than that it was a bunch of smoke and mirrors luckily for them Wii's press conference was an hour explaining how they no longer service more serious gamers.

Also with the FF XIII to GTA comparision... "To me it's a little bit analogous to the GTA announcement. Microsoft spent a lot of money to get the development on their platform. And if you look at what happened in May, you could see there was a pretty even split between PS3 [and 360], so I'm not sure that it had the impact that Microsoft was banking on," Are you kidding?! Just the fact it was a close to even split means it worked. With how many people got that game, if it would have been PS3 exclusive you would have seen the hardware sales boost everyone was expecting. Instead you got a 'split'... If you don't see the advantage they just took away from you, you don't know MS well enough. Expect to get really side swiped this gen (with FF XIII for example) and it will only get worse until you lose all your market share.

I haven't been able to figure out why the developers can't detect if there is a hard drive in the X360 and behave differently (like download rent / purchase) if it has one...

RiceCake: I download 'HD' resolution movies on my PC all the time and stream them to my PS3 and/or 360 all the time via microsoft video extender, and believe me its nowhere near the same as a lossless HD source. Just because a video file is in 1920 x 1080 DOES NOT make it HD quality from both a video and audio standpoint. In order for a 1920 x 1080 file to fit into a 2 gb file, the source would need to be compressed quite a bit. With compression comes lower contrast levels, lower color spectrum levels, lower frame rates, lower audio frequency levels.....and most importantly lower bitrates (in mbps). A Blu-ray / HD-DVD disc has a bitrate of 40 mbps....a two hour video file at 1920 x 1080 at 40mbps is easily at least 20gb. Given that your file is compressed to 2gb, it isn't too far fetched to assume that your file would have somewhere around a 4mbps bitrate (a common bitrate with most internet 'HD' files). And believe me, that equates to a big difference in quality when played through any half-way decent home theater system. You know the difference between a song played straight off a CD and a 128kbps mp3 file? How about a vinyl record vs a 68kbps file. Think of that, but in much larger proportions.

Interesting.

Bill has the money, and apparently money is no object.

M$ has deep pockets, thats why their M"$", besides, I doubt the wii would be able to run GTA as the developers would want it to, and mugging and beating people senseless seems a little out of the wii's "family approach".

...Nintendo could probably shell out the cash to if they were so desperate to get GTA4 and FF if they really wanted to...I s'pose if anything M$ will just run themselves into the ground with this splurging...

kalipekona said: "Look, having a preference for one console over another doesn't make you a fanboy, ignoring facts or selectively applying different standards does ... it gets really old hearing xbox fanboys make excuses for Microsofts blunders while simultaneously overexaggerating Sony's missteps." I agree fanboys are bad but you come off as one yourself defending sony for an obviously poor decision. At times its necessary to apply different standards in different situations. The xbox wasn't nearly the software giant PS2 was, so its excuseable for them to use software to ensure partial backward compatibility on the 360. I owned an xbox and besides Halo and a couple other games I can't think of anything I'd play again. However, by Sony taking out backward compatibility for the PS3, they are alienating the majority of gamers from the previous generation who still want to play their old games and have PS2s that are suffering from old age. I, myself, don't care that much about bc, possibly owing to my owning a 360, but I can't help but notice how deliciously ironic it is that Sony, who pride themselves, and rightly so, on longevity of their products, are so quick to rid themselves of the previous generations games.

Sony is concerned with the game attach rate being so low on the PS3. So their solution to this is to remove backwards compatibility. This effectively shuts off all the back catalog of PS 2 titles. Forcing people to buy new PS 3 games. Or that's the theory.

Ya because obviously people who own a PS3 just want to go out and buy a PS2.

as a marketing person i hate it when marketeres show such a lack of understanding (or at least ont heir surface statements). People PAY the extra 100 dollars for the added B/C as well as the extra HD space! ""Most of our user base that's worried about backwards compatibility has a PlayStation 2,"" Actually, from the sound of it, much like with the PS2, ALOT of users that are worried about B/C.....ARE WORRIED ABOUT BC, hence they want to have it. Whether to only have to deal with one system, or because alot of these people have had a PS2 long enough for the piece of junk to get run down, and trust me, we dont want to buy another one when the PS3 should be a feasible replacement. I dont like the statements Diller has made because he does seem to show a big change in position, and a lack of understanding from this point that sony once had a very different stance on.

Hey just because i own a ps2 doesn't mean that i would want to have the system being stocked up in my game room amongst other systems taking up space. I would like to keep my gaming area with as much space as possible which is why i hate the fact that this new ps3 doesn't support backwards compatibility. I could've gotten rid of my old ps2 system and kept some of my AAA titles for that platform to be used on the ps3 rather than having to have 2 go back to the ps2 to play these games. PS2 was backwards compatible and its only fair that ps3 is too. I understand that they want the ps2 systems to keep selling but in the next 2 years or so, that system would have reached its 10 year life span as had been intended and probably won't be selling as much so for heaven sake Sony, give us backwards compatibility on the ps3!!

Sony doesn't need a price cut, it's outselling the 360 every month so far. I really don't think its that big of a deal and on top of that they have 2 other systems that are selling just as good.

And the system war continues!

Whatever. I think I'll stick with getting Final Fantasy XIII on the PS3. I wonder if this means that FF Versus XIII will also be on the 360 as well.

Generic_Dude said: "What a delusional fool... indicating that MS taking exclusivity from the last huge exclusive franchise they could is no big deal. And then with the PS2 argument for BC... such arrogance. I really don't know if I'm going to be buying whatever Sony sells next gen. They're What a delusional fool... indicating that MS taking exclusivity from the last huge exclusive franchise they could is no big deal. And then with the PS2 argument for BC... such arrogance. I really don't know if I'm going to be buying whatever Sony sells next gen. They're dropping the ball left and right and then insulting US for it.." How is what Sony is saying about backward compatibility any different than what Microsoft said about it---that it isn't that important, that people will want to play new generation games, etc? How is it arrogant for Sony to say such things but isn't for Microsoft? You fanboys seem to see everything through a filter. Look, having a preference for one console over another doesn't make you a fanboy, ignoring facts or selectively applying different standards does. Of course having a big third party exclusive go multi-platform does represent some form of loss for Sony, and of course Sony are going to downplay it (Microsoft would do the same thing). But I think some Xbox fanboys way overstate the importance of it. Third party published games should not really be considered exclusives unless they are expressly stated as such, and even in that case, unless there is a contract in place I wouldn't count on any third party game staying exclusive to one platform. Bioshock coming to the PS3 and FFXIII now coming to the 360, are a couple of examples. If a game is not specifically published by one of the three console makers (Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo) don't even think of it as an exclusive. A third party game might incidentally be an exclusive at a given moment in time but the odds are, given current economic realities, that it will go multi-platform at some time. For example, Sony consoles are the destination for one of my favorite franchises, the Yakuza games (Yakuza 1 & 2 on PS2, Yakuza Kenzan on PS3), but the games are published by Sega and so it wouldn't come as some huge shock if the games eventually went multi-platform. With that said, fortunately both Sony and Microsoft still have a good catalog of exclusive first party franchises and upcoming games to distinguish their respective consoles. And despite fanboy rantings to the contrary Sony most definitely has enough first party exclusives to go head to head with Microsoft. The whole "the PS3 has no games" argument is so ridiculously dishonest and played out. So I don't see how you can claim that Sony is "dropping the ball left and right and then insulting US for it". What about the horrible failure rate and constant freezes many of us get with the Xbox 360? What about Microsoft saying HDMI wasn't important and having us loyal fans buy the 360 at launch sans HDMI only to have Microsoft turn around and add it on at a later date? (That one particularly pissed me off) The fact is, Sony is doing a great many things right, but also making some mistakes in a few areas. The same goes for Microsoft. But it gets really old hearing xbox fanboys make excuses for Microsofts blunders while simultaneously overexaggerating Sony's missteps.

Sony just needs to admit they're doing this because Blu-ray technology is still expensive and they have no other way to cheapen their consoles except to remove backwards compatibility. If Microsoft does another price cut before the 4th quarter shopping season, I don't know what other drastic measures Sony could take to drop their price as well except maybe selling PS3s with no controller or video cables.

@Boat3600: O ok, I thought you were saying that nobody would want to play ps2 games if they had ps3 games.

@SocaWarrior It's just not needed when you have a PS2. Whatever you did with yours, that what you did. But the fact is 90% of PS3 owners own a PS2 that works fine.

The trouble I have is, I want a PS3, but I'm not really willing to spend $400 on it. If they had found a way to sell the 40 gig PS3 at a lower price, that would have done a lot more to convince me to buy it. As is, I already have a 360, and it's hard to justify the $400 to play three (admittedly great) games (GoWIII, MGSIV and Ratchet and Clank) since everything else I want I can already play on what I have. That would be like spending $190 a game. Blu-ray is nice but there isn't much in the way of Blu-ray movies I want to watch. When I want to see a movie in HD, I really would prefer to see it on the big screen.

@ Yuck_Too: Oh, yea. Pure, I think I know what your saying. I misunderstood you at first, but because the PSP doesn't have HD output cables it doesn't display it in full HD even though its holding the HD file. Regardless, my original point still stands that there is good reason to have videos stored on PS3's HDD, and I still think its gonna help sony move some PSP's

--RiceCake -- I'm not saying you didn't DL a HD movie and transfer it. I am saying that the device converts it to 480p when you do. That is the whole copy protection stuff involved with HMDI cables connecting HDMC devices to pass the ICT. Anything other then that means you get a 16:9 - 480p copy with stereo sound.

@Boat3600 I mean, I dont see how that enhances the argument of having a ps3 without backwards compatability. I just don't see why thats being mentioned.

@ hbxclo: I downloaded a 2 gig HD movie last night that was 89 minutes long and it took about 30-40 minutes to download. Once it was 30% done, I started watching it and it was fully downloaded before I was finished. Its a pretty sweet process that you seem to know nothing about cuz you prolly just have Xbox360. I've never downloaded HD movies for Xbox, so I cant say if its faster or slower than that, but none of the PC's that I've had will download 2 gigs in 40 min!

@SocaWarrior: I said OWNED. Past tense, which you just admitted to. Checkmate again.

@ Yuck_Too: When you download the movie off of PS Store You can choose between HD quality and SD quality. You then transfer it to your memory stick and SCHZAM! you've got HD quality video. Its sweet stuff!

@Boat3600: Lol.. nope, I took it apart before I got my ps3 (so dumb, cause I had to wait a while before playing video games again). I broke the fan, and just didn't feel like putting it back together again. But yea, I play all my ps2 games on my 60 gigs unit.

@SocaWarrior: Well, if you own those games, then you most likely owned a PS2. Checkmate.

If you want to play PS2 games on your HDTV AND have it look good, then yes you need a PS3 with BC. Games look like garbage on a standard PS2 hooked up to a TV since not all games have progressive scanning. the PS3 upscales so it looks infinitely better. Also, I play waaaaaay more PS2 games than PS3 games. I discovered ratchet and clank for the first time and now I am playing though them all. I don't own ONE PS3 game.

Boat3600: Well, some people still play those games. I just recently had to finish MGS3 before I played MGS 4. And my freinds and I still play monopoly party. I also recently bought aggressive inline and the Sonic collection. My ps2 likeness is still going strong.

Rice Cake: I highly doubt you can download a movie and enjoy it in lossless video and audio, particularly if you're moving from medium to medium as you described. Current bandwidth speeds don't make downloading a 40gb movie feasible. There would have to be some compression involved, which would greatly affect the quality of the movie in a very noticeable way on any half-way decent home theatre set-up. The xbox 360's HD downloads take up about 8 gigs, and run in compressed 720p video and compressed audio. Looks and sounds like crap, and isn't worth the time it takes to download. I, for one, prefer physical discs over compressed downloads. I'm not excited about Microsoft's alliance with netflix, nor am I excited about the PS3's video download service. Downloads over PSN are even slower than on Xbox live.

--RiceCake -- Not to burst your bubble but when you hook a PSP up to a TV to show a movie it is no where near the quality of HD much less 7.1 sound. HD movie @720p give or take around 3gig Blu-ray @1080p with 7.1 give or take 12gig UMD holds 1.8 and I'd have to go check but since it's not a HDMC connected device the quality gets droped to 480p and stereo sound.

I seriously doubt people are going to want to go back to old PS2 games and PS1 games when the PS3's game line-up gets better. Seriously, its not a big deal; would you really play, let's say, God of War 2 on the PS3 when God of War 3 is available?? Or MGS2 versus MGS4?? It's not a big deal, really. 90% of PS3 owners have a PS2.

@ Hotdork70minus1: I thought the same thing at first, but then you have to consider the PSP functionality. I think its a great idea to own videos on the PS3 HDD so that you can stream them to your portable PSP or download them for taking them on the road. And if you just wanna bring it along to a friends house, you can hook the PSP up to any TV just like a DVD playing and play an HD movie with 7.1 surround sound. Its a really smart marketing move that's probably gonna sell more PSP's!

Whether GTAIV sold more on the PS3 or the xbox is insignificant. Whether or not Final Fantasy XIII sells more on the PS3 or the Xbox 360 is insignificant. What matters is that both GTA and FF are system selling series', and that by losing exclusivity, they lose the opportunity to capture much needed additional console sales. In a console era where there are only marginal differences between the processing power of the two primary systems, high quality exclusive titles is arguably the most important factor to winning this generations consol war. The PS3 is losing traction in being the cheapest and/or best equipped Blu-ray player. Sony NEEDED GTA and FF to close the gap between the PS3 and the 360.