Sony's Shuhei Yoshida

That has made a huge, huge day to day difference, and a month-to-month and year-to-year difference!

Actually, I'd say that Move was the first platform project that, from day one, from the very conceptual stage, had Worldwide Studios involved. Actually, WWS was involved before SCE's hardware guys were involved. It was between Richard Marks, the SCEA R&D group and Worldwide Studios teams - they started looking into next-gen motion gaming, and tried every different kind of technology, including 3D cameras and other motion capture technologies like magnetics or ultrasound.

We settled on Richard Marks' new invention, and he actually hand-carried his hand-made Move prototype to Japan and asked them if they could make it, if it was possible to manufacture it.

That's a totally, totally different approach from the days when Ken was running the company. As soon as Kaz took over Ken's position, Kaz told the people in Japan that from now on, they had to talk to Worldwide Studios about anything about the platform, and get our feedback on any decisions. I thought, "wow"!

That was the time when I was appointed as president of Worldwide Studios, and I discussed it and agreed to move my base from the US to Japan. Running Worldwide Studios, if it was just the studios, I could be anywhere, right? I could be in Europe, or the US, or Japan. But I realised that with Kaz' new initiative, he wants to run his company's platform-side development as a collaboration between WWS and the hardware teams.

But there had never been that kind of process. People understood Kaz' vision, but they didn't know what to do, or who to talk to. They had set milestones in terms of developing hardware. I felt like I could uniquely go into that group of engineers in Japan and suggest a new process - interject the right kind of software teams to the right kind of hardware issues that need solutions.

I felt that, because they didn't have to talk to us when they were making hardware decisions previously, they might feel like the process took too long if they had to go through additional steps. I was afraid that they might not like it. But what's really exciting, for me, is that I have found that they really, really embraced the relationship. They always wanted to make hardware that great games could be made for - but they didn't know who to talk to. They were making decisions with very limited insight from the software side, regarding what kind of hardware features or tools would make game developers happy.

Not only were we able to say, yes, this feature is good, or this other feature won't be necessary - we could show examples, the reasons why some features are more important than others. We could use our game concepts, our prototypes, and show them the reasons. Then it becomes really clear in their minds - they understood that they had to make Move's response time as good as Dual Shock, in order to make it adaptable to all kinds of games. That kind of technical decision can now be made with direct insight from gaming teams.

The engineers say that they're so glad to hear these things - they can't think of any other way of making new hardware, now.

Right, right.

Oh, that should be different! Not only do we give them input, but Worldwide Studios' tech teams are part of the platform OS and tools development. That's a completely new world as well.

Our central tech groups, the WWS tech groups, have been making game engines or tools for the studios in the group - but now they are part of the tools of development and the low-level middleware library development. That means the future platform, the PlayStation platform tools and OS... At least part of those will actually be developed by game developers! [laughs]

We have unique talent on the game side, different from the hardware guys. We're trying to combine all of the talent from our global organisation.