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Sony's Shuhei Yoshida

On PS3 Slim, the motion controller and PSP Minis.

EurogamerDo you think the fact you're using something that you already have, the PlayStation Eye, is almost a kind of philosophical shift for Sony, rather than going after the absolute cutting edge as Microsoft has done with Natal?
Shuhei Yoshida

We have already done the camera-only solution, and we are still doing it, like EyePet - you can do very interesting, amazing things with just the camera. But with the camera-only solution, there are certain limits we all know about. By combining the already-existing camera technology with advanced sensors internally, I think we are trying to hit the right balance of cost and the features.

EurogamerSo it wasn't really so much a thing of not going to the cutting edge - you felt the camera was perfectly good for what you wanted to do.
Shuhei Yoshida

Yeah. I think we're still going for cutting edge in terms of what we can do.

EurogamerLooking at the PSP and the Minis initiative, how long has that been in the making and what sparked it off?
PSPgo, which launches on 1st October for £224.99, will be joined by 15 Minis at launch, and those registering their device before 10th October get Gran Turismo PSP for nowt.
Shuhei Yoshida

The thinking was that with the development of PSPgo, as we decided to add the digital-only solution, of course the big question is how to deliver content to this new device. The infrastructure of the internet gets better and more and more people have decent broadband speed, but still UMD can hold more than 1GB, and lots of our games have already hit the maximum limit, so the user experience of downloading 1GB game to PSPgo is not ideal. We wanted to send a message that you don't necessarily have to use all the content to the capacity of the media, you can create more content and sell for cheaper price. Apple has proven that there are lots of people willing to try things out if it's very easy to download and an affordable price.

So this is more about targeting and positioning of contents for the PSP platform than the technical aspect of things. Still developers use the same toolkit - and we did lower the price of PSP toolkit to help make the entry barrier lower. We are also working on some process improvements so that when the game is made it's an easier experience for developers to get the game out on the market. We are still working on that side.

EurogamerThere was a report that the pricing was going to be €5 or lower. Is that right?
Shuhei Yoshida

I don't think we've announced that. [One of our fleet of PR chaperones interjects: "No, we're going to be announcing the price closer to launch, but it will be competitive."]

EurogamerIs this competitive with the iTunes App Store? With Xbox Live or PSN?
Shuhei Yoshida

The price points talked about sounds right [laughs] for consumers and expectations.

EurogamerYou've mentioned UMDs a few times, and obviously there are plenty who own them who want to know what will happen with them. Will they be able to get the games they have onto PSPgo somehow?
Shuhei Yoshida

We are still in discussion on what we can do.

The horribly-named Xross Media Bar (it means nothing!) is undergoing a bit of a revamp in firmware 3.0, although Yoshida expects changes to be incremental from here on.
EurogamerOn the subject of PS3 firmware 3.0, one of the things Microsoft did last year was to redesign their interface due to the volumes of content. Do you think the changes in this 3.0 update are sufficient to cope with things like the video-on-demand service that's coming to Europe later this year, and the volumes of software you're going to have to have on the XMB these days?
Shuhei Yoshida

I think it's the right step forward, and especially we wanted to make the PlayStation 3 a bit more alive-feeling, something you want to boot up every day and see what's going on.

As you said, there are more and more contents on the PSN store, so you may miss something that might be very relevant to you - the games you're playing every day, new content might have just appeared, but is buried in the layer of menus on the store. So things like 'What's New' are trying to customise the experience so what you do gets reflected in what you see the next day.

We are taking one step at a time to make it a bit more manageable and make it easier for consumers to navigate through.

EurogamerDo you think you'll need to revise it as dramatically as Microsoft did at some point, or will you be able to stick with the current cross-media-bar layout for the long term?
Shuhei Yoshida

I think we have the fundamentals in there, so the approach we are taking is to make managing your digital content easier in terms of how you get it and how you move it from PS3 to PSP. We are also updating the Media Go software to manage your PSP products. Definitely there's no [claim that] this is the ultimate user interface for the PS3, but the incremental approach that we are taking I think is the right way to go.

EurogamerOne thing that I've felt about Sony for a while is that you seem to focus on creative games, like Heavy Rain, and take a chance on them. As someone who's intimately involved in development across the platform, how do you balance that creative need against the commercial imperatives that you face?
Shuhei Yoshida

Well, sometimes the most creative products give the biggest financial success, so we are very optimistic that when we take a chance, we take a chance on something we totally believe in.

We know that not everything we bet on will be successful, but we are very lucky to be able to work with very creative people like David Cage's group or Media Molecule, so as long as we see the developer has a vision and also the keen and tenacity to get things really done, we will continue to support them.

Shuhei Yoshida is head of Sony Worldwide Studios.

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