Gadgetory

hi this is brian crecente from box gains speaking to you from sony headquarters in new york and i'm here with jack tretton the president and CEO of sony computer entertainment of america jack nice to see you again Ryan great to see you too so tonight you will be you're staying up I guess you just flew in from the west coast but you're staying up for the the launch of the Vita here in North America yeah the morning came a little hard but by midnight I should be cooking and you know if you can't be excited about a platform launched you shouldn't be in the business I'm thrilled that this will be my fourth platform launched with sony and very very excited about vita now this launch is I know this is the the full launch but you've already had I guess a little taste of the launch with an earlier version that came out or a bundle that came out a little earlier this month have you gotten any sort of numbers or do you have any sense on how that went yeah it's the first time we've ever done that we had a pre-sale bundle available that gave consumers an opportunity to get in their hands a week early so they picked it up on the fifteenth and we did see some initial reads and clearly we're dealing with the most hardcore of the core but I was really pleased to see not only the number of games that sold but the depth of games and then also great great peripheral attached a lot of people going out there and buying a lot of different accessories for Vita as well is there a particular game that's doing really well were people going out sort of buying specific games for that when they got the bundle or if you're not seeing no question about that and really not a surprise there uncharted golden Abyss i think is the ultimate launch game and really a testament to what the vita can do so near is I think a neat idea the idea of sort of being able to pick up or drop off like presents to your friends I through this sort of online network I'm a little a little confused in how I'm going to use it in the long term like I'm still it's what it's one of the newer things I guess that I experienced when I started playing around with the veto so how do you use it in like what kind of future do you think near has for the Vita and maybe for other PlayStation products online well I think consumers in general and people you you take comfort in people that are living the same life that you are so if you're traveling all the time it's you know you realize that you're not the only one living out of a suitcase spending a lot of time in airports if you're a gamer your real social you want to share your experiences you want to talk about your experiences with your friends the great thing about near is I hit that button and I'm able to see an incredible amount of people that are gaming locally and find out what they're playing what they like make new friends that way and it's done in a you know it's done via GPS so if I'm here in New York I live in San Francisco all of a sudden I'm exposed to all these people that are gaming in Manhattan with a touch of a button and it's amazing how much you have in common with the people that are out there gaming that only the games you're playing but the type of games that you're interested in as well one of the other things i noticed i think everybody's going to notice obviously is the live area which is sort of the interface that you guys have we don't we don't have the cross media bar anymore what was the reasoning behind that do you think that library is going to be sort of the future of the user interface for playstation products well i think in general terms we've really focused on the user experience and to try to make that as seamless as possible to make it is easy to use and that's just something i notice about the vita initially not only the game controls but the ability to toggle in and out of apps and get from point A to point B very easily and connect with other gamers so do you is it an experience you think that's specifically designed for the portable market or could we see this either coming to the PlayStation 3 or to a future hardware that's sitting at home well I think PlayStation has really been a bellwether among the Sony family in terms of connected digital devices and of course the goal is to have all sony digital devices connected in a format that people are very comfortable with in and connect various devices at the same time not only within the sony universe but outside it as well so i really see it as a potential sign of things to come on other so many devices is this is maybe a little a little too nitty-gritty but the ps3 does it have the ability to have that sort of massive change go live could you for instance do an update or a patch for the ps3 that would completely change the interface to something like what the Vita has I don't know that you're going to see something that's identical to the Vita day one but I think if you look back on the history of the playstation 3 that interface is improved on a regular basis and has evolved that being said people have worked with it since 2006 and it kind of has its own look to it and Vita certainly works in concert with that but I don't think you're going to see Vita 2 point 0 on the PlayStation 3 in the near future you will see a lot of the features influence each other though actually the cross media bar you think I think the cross media bar is here to stay in PlayStation 3 for the foreseeable future so the Vita we were talking a little bit earlier about how you might use the veto one of the things I think is really interesting is that the Vita seems from a design perspective to be a device that wasn't created with the idea of the form factor first so it doesn't feel like Sony sat down and said okay this needs to fit in a pocket and then we're going to figure out all the things we can put on it it kind of feels like Sony wanted to design something that was a good gaming device and then worry later about the form factor is that right i mean d was this about designing something that was a certain size or was it more about the experience there's been a real focus across Sony for a number of years and I think Vita is one of the perfect examples of focusing on the user experience and putting tools in the hands of the people that would create that user experience I think historically we would create a great engineering technology and we would hand it off to software development teams and say here so we could do with this and then they try to create the best gaming experience and we turn to consumers and say what do you think of this I think we did it in reverse order this time we said to you know consumers what would you ideally like to see in a device we said to the software development community what tools do you need to create the best possible games and user experiences and then ultimately we designed device around it so I think we did it ideally from the users perspective out as opposed to the designers perspective in i think in designing something like this there's always this risk when you're doing something innovative that instead of making something innovative you perhaps create something that's out on guard in this sense that someone will see the device as interesting and different but over time might lose interest in it so it's it's it becomes not something that that can kind of jump that hurdle and become mainstream I the Japanese sales have sort of been dropping a little bit are you guys worried about that or do you think that there's going to be a main mainstream appeal to this device I think we've had a better focus around the design of Vida of any device that we've been involved in and make no mistake this was designed by gamers for gamers and if you're a gamer you will get it immediately when you hold it in your hand and you will see that we've created tools to create the ultimate games for gamers if you're not a gamer then you're may not be able to get it day one and we'll eventually ideally get to you but we didn't design it for the casual consumer that dabbles with gaming we designed it for the hardcore gamer and we think we can reach out to the casual audience but clearly we designed it with the core gamer in mind would you say that this is going after the playstation 3 audience or do you think it's more of a hardcore gamer like that broader like xbox wii ps3 audience a bc the the center of the bullseye is the ps3 owner male 20-something and i think the second concentric circle out from that is just core gamer in general but i think the advantage of having a playstation 3 consumers being the center of the target is they've already got their trophies they've already got their friends they've already got their online ID they've got the playstation 3 experience and they're going to appreciate the cloud saves and picking up a game that they had just paused on playstation 3 and taken it with them on the vita going after the ps3 market you sort of outline some of the things just now that would make that a little easier you know you don't have to essentially re-educate some gamers right but are there are you guys are already starting to think about okay how do we appeal to someone who for instance owns an xbox 360 and wants to have that full sort of core gaming experience on the go you don't have that appeal built-in of being able to say you can go from your Xbox to your Vita obviously so is there some way that you guys might sort of try to tackle that you know first and foremost we're targeting gamers and the good news is there's more gamers and there's ever been before supposedly there's a billion consumers worldwide they consider themselves gamers 163 million in the United States and those of us been gaming for a long time know that that was a much smaller audience back in the day and now everybody considers himself somewhat of a gamer and I think that's good you know that that ultimately gets people to appreciate that this is mainstream entertainment and for those of us who are dedicated to the gaming industry it says you know you picked the right business to be and it's bigger than it's ever been so you mentioned I phone and tablet gamers earlier you talked about sort of I guess everybody sees those those people people who game just that way or primarily that way is sort of the biggest broadest audience is there a way do you think to attract someone who's used to spending less than a dollar on a game to a system that granite has less expensive games but doesn't have dollar games and really it sounds seems to live in forty to fifty or thirty to forty dollar range I think there's a great opportunity because just gaming in general intimidated a lot of people i mean just buttons and control and how do i make that work and why would i want to play a game and i think if you looked five years ago 10 years ago 20 years ago you you'd find the majority of people didn't consider themself gamers and may have never played a game nowadays you know just about everybody that you're going to encounter is either playing currently or is played at some point in their lives so it's less intimidating than it's been before and so once you demystify gaming and you understand that it's not so hard to control characters and you realize the interactive and immersive nature of gaming as i said i think is it starts to hook you you find yourself wanting more and more you want more depth to gaming you want more control of the characters and that's where i feel we can really migrate up people up the food chain and the great thing with a device like a playstation vita it doesn't have to be the fifty-dollar uncharted experience it can be 99 cent playstation minis which I think compare very favorably to games are available on smartphones so that entire ecosystem is available on the Vita but it's not limited to those small form experiences you do have the opportunity to play you know the full form games like an uncharted it's interesting because again we're talking about this earlier but the idea of I think over the years with the introduction of smartphones like the iphone and android phones you've had this rise in devices that get people to make decisions in terms of what they're willing to accept because of the convenience so the convenience of having something in your pocket that you have to have there because it's a phone but then we're starting to sort of see this this turn now where people are going out and I'm one of those people I went out and I bought a kindle i can read kindle books on my iphone but i went out and bought a kindle because i like that i like that it was designed and developed for a book so do you think that you can sort of convince people like amazon has convinced people with a kindle that they need to go out and buy a device that's made just a game and won't do other things well you just hit the nail in the head and you probably know it better than anybody if you're a gamer then you're going to gravitate towards a dedicated gaming device everything has a core competency and you said it yourself if it's a smartphone it's a smartphone that can also gain and if gaming is number four number five on your priority list for what you want that device to do that might be good enough for you but if you're a gamer you're going to be drawn to something that's going to give you the ultimate gaming experience do you have any way of tracking or have you tried to sort of look at those people who are the angry birds game players or hidden object game players or you know the two minutes every three or four hour game players and seeing if they have the interest in sort of making that jump over from being super casual gamers to being what I guess we call net hardcore gamers I think there's more interest than there's ever been before I think back to the launch of PSP in 2005 and that was a dedicated gaming device targeted towards gamers but the thought of getting a housewife or a business man under the PSP was much more daunting to me than it is today if some mom is sitting there playing words with friends or playing angry birds and she sees a Vita where she wouldn't even notice it before you find them looking over to it going you know what the heck is that and again people have the ability to see that the visual effects they see the graphics they see the depth the game play in there and they're going to be drawn to it so i think there's absolutely that potential just from you know being able to demystify it and have people holding a controller in their hand whether it's a you know a touch controller on a smartphone or whether it's a dedicated controller and a console than ever before so I know we're running at a time I really want to talk to you though about the PSP so obviously this isn't the first portable that you guys have launched you have seven years I think experience with PlayStation Portable and yet the PSP come out you had four iterations of that and then the PS go came out what do you think you learned from that because you mentioned several times sort of the launch of the PSP and that came during a time when I think portable gaming wasn't the expectation of portable gaming wasn't the same in many ways in two different directions you there wasn't the expectation that you could have this really light enjoyable experience or that you could have this really hardcore experience so what do you think you've learned from the PSP and applied to the Vita and also the go I thought was a really i love the PSP go I felt like it didn't get the consumer support it deserved I was a big fan of it so what did you guys take away from that experience in coming out with the veto well tremendous lessons learned there as i said earlier in the discussion when we came out with the PSP people saw dedicated portable devices is more casual is more youth oriented we ushered in the older consumer the more console like experience and we very successfully sold over 75 million units in that seven year window that you referred to now with the PlayStation Vita we have promise of a lot of the things that we attempted to do with the original PlayStation Portable we've got the technology and the horsepower to be used in conjunction with ps3 much more than we did back in the early days of PSP we've got a true multimedia device that's really the expectation as opposed to an ideal expansion of the market as it was in 2005 but we've got the gaming in the user interface that we'd always hoped for the dual analog sticks the front and back touched the dual cameras so it's really the console gaming experience in the pamir that we hope to bring the consumers and quite frankly I think we very proudly did based on 2005 technology but as I said the gaming universe is bigger than it's ever been before we've established the fact that portable gaming isn't just for casual isn't just for youth that it can be for the core gamer as well and I think we're going to reap the benefits of that with the PlayStation Vita I very last question i promise i just wanted to get clarification because it seems like there's been a little confusion on the UMD passport program it's coming to North America not coming to North America it's not coming to North America mean that was a program created in Japan for Japanese consumers and I think if you follow Sony and you follow PlayStation in particular you realize that the platforms are marketed very differently there at very different price points with different product offerings and I think we're proud of the product offerings we have for the consumers in the States but that's different from the product offerings and the way we mark it to consumers in Japan so that was a Japan program that I believe worked really well for them but we feel we've got a good amount of offerings and a good value for consumers it you know with the existing program that we have all right well thank you very much for taking the time and love tonight I think it's going to be be exciting thanks i'm looking forward to it you