Microsoft's Don Mattrick vs. Sony's Kaz Hirai
Five questions we asked the pair of them.
Nintendo's an awesome company. When I think of Nintendo, I think about youth, so I traditionally think 14 and younger. I think about a few key software assets that they have that are awesome assets - things like Zelda, Mario - those are great things.
I also think that Nintendo has tended to be a first party experience, so the products that they make have garnered the majority of revenue, and the profit is usually whatever that revenue percentage is plus five or 10, so there's a very small amount left for other content creators. The consumers tend to have a lower usage pattern in terms of hours and dollars spent in the aggregate.
I think it's wonderful - they're bringing young people into the market, those young people have families and friends, they're anticipating, they're learning about our category and that's kind of a natural evolution.
I've heard about this sort of casual more accessible process since I started in 1982. I can remember when we did our first product doing interviews with people asking, 'who's going to create this casual product, make it more accessible?' and I'd say well I think there's going to be all kinds of art in our category, that at its core what makes our category special is we make you the hero.
We put you into the story and there's just not one story, or one degree of immersion, or one degree of interaction, or one degree of fidelity. This concept of one-sizes-fits-all - I don't know about you, but I don't have just one CD that I listen to or one TV channel that I keep on all the time, so I think people are over-indexing on that and missing what's really happening.
What's really happening is people are spending more time in interactive relative to other forms of entertainment - huge win for us as an industry - and at our core we're immersive and it comes through interaction, through that feeling of participating, through the emotional connection, like a great song at a point in your life and you hear it later and it brings back positive memories. We're building more positive memories with consumers around the globe and our business is going to grow in scale, there's absolutely no doubt about it.
I think we would approach it from the other way around, to basically say that whether it's a first party game, or a third party game, for the user to really enjoy the experience the controller we already have doesn't really do the job - and so we need a controller that looks like this, and does X, Y and Z - then let's go ahead and make sure that we have something like that so the gameplay can be enhanced.
We'd approach it from the software entertainment side.