Yoshida's Island - Part One

Not yet - we're in the middle of moving. Actually next week is the date, so my wife couldn't believe I was here this week... but we're getting ready.

But in terms of work, as you know we set up the management structure for Europe, with Michael Denny now heading up all the studios in Europe, while Scott Rhode is heading up the US studios - and they're developing strong ties between the development teams in Europe and the US. So I'm very comfortable with that situation.

Well, yes, although it's really the Sony Computer Entertainment business. My primary responsibility is money and studios, but personally in my head it's more about how we can get closer with the hardware groups in Tokyo.

The best way for me to realise that is to be there, and always make sure that the software side is represented - because I'm sure it's not that the other sides aren't interested in what we are thinking, it's just that they're so busy, so they have to rely on what they hear from the industry in Japan, or internal thinking there.

So it's just more convenient me being there, they can just ask my opinion. I can introduce them to people from the Europe or US teams too.

Yes, absolutely. We're progressively increasing the capacity as we have more and more content. Internally, we find we're already deleting content ourselves to make way for new content - that's not fun. So that will happen with our users as well.

But there's a desire for us to keep the price point at a certain level, so that's why we decided to have two options - the 160GB and the 80GB.

We're very happy with the momentum that the platform has. People have responded very well with the whole package, not just the games but having the ability to play Blu-rays, the video download service in the US, and the TV programmes for the PlayStation Portable in Europe.

We now have room to play with different combinations and packages so that a variety of consumer interests can be matched.

That has been our company strength, and it will continue to be so. For the same specification they can make more space and a more attractive design, and for the same space they can pack in more technology - they can always do that. Our role from the software standpoint is really to get them to make the right choices - when they have a certain amount of space they can prioritise the most important technology.

Yes - we're more open about approaching and bringing services in to PS3 and PSP. We can't support all the needs of the consumer and there are great companies providing services on the PC already - so we're very open to provide the opportunity to those companies to reach our user base as well.

We like to provide as many services as possible for free - we already provide our network access for gameplay for free - and the interesting thing about the network side and the Internet business is that there's a variety of revenue sources. Not necessarily getting people to pay, but with advertising and so on.

Those are things we're looking at, and learning how we can provide a service without people having to pay - but we still get our operation running with funding from somewhere so that we can maintain the level of quality we want.

I can't wait to see how consumer will create stuff using the tools. It's great to play many different levels that Media Molecule has been creating, and you can spend hours finishing this game - but there's the possibility of hundreds of thousands of interesting things for consumers, and people will spend that time. When we were kids we'd spend lots and lots of time, just because we were motivated.

Even yesterday looking at the booth, there was somebody trying to recreate a level from Yoshi's Island - it was fun to watch what people can come up with when the tools are robust enough.

Well, maybe the users can't have Mario as a character...

There are two things - from a technical standpoint the London Studio has always been making use of the camera, from the PlayStation 2 days, and they've been working hard on ways to better use the camera technology for PS3. We've seen small applications that make use of PlayStation Eye - but that's really small things, and we know we can do much more.

So I think technically-speaking that one of the things the team really wanted to do was work on what augmented reality really was, and in a way that people would understand - so to interact with the pet, and the pet recognises you, that's something that has a magical power.

But from the other side of the fence, we're doing a lot of games for core users. We have studios everywhere - Guerilla is doing Killzone, and Evolution is working on Motorstorm. So we really want to offer products to a broader variety of people, and we wanted to show the industry that this is how we're expanding our platform.

So London Studio is really best-placed for showing how these things can be done, because they've worked on games in that space for many years - they know how consumers are going to react, how to make it accessible and fun.

Yes, there are so many things that we want to do, more than we can do with the resources. So when London Studio was looking at the early work on EyePet and the prototype of Eight Days, they knew they couldn't do all of them - and there are even more things they're working on at early concept stage.

So your expertise and ideas are best spent on some titles rather than others.

It's really exciting - people have spent so much money already, and these songs are timeless.