To 1UP Phil Harrison
1UP Interviews Phil Harrison
Remember that E3 thing? During that three days of not-so-glorious madness, we cornered Sony Computer Entertainment's Head of Worldwide Studios, Phil Harrison, for some head-to-head discussion about a number of topics related to the PlayStation universe. What'd we talk about? GameVideos has the footage, with highlights below.
video: http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/13584
Madden on PS3 Only 30 FPS
"[pause] Well, I can only point to our own sports studio [doing a] 1080p, 60 frames-per-second basketball game, but I'm afraid I have no idea. We're providing some tools and technologies from our worldwide studio's core technology groups to 3rd parties now, as well. You may remember something from GDC, we announced this thing called EDGE and that's now widely deployed within the 3rd party community, and that is clearly improving the developer's ability to maximize what the CELL processor does. Hopefully, that will assist folks like EA. It would concern me if the platform was incapable of doing it, but we've proven the platform is capable of doing it, so it's not a PlayStation 3 issue. I'm trying to be polite."
How Home is Progressing
"We did have a small hiccup on getting the Home development kit out, but it actually went out on Tuesday [Harrison is referring to Tuesday, July 10th], so that's already started out there. Some of the functionality that goes into Home is actually based on top of the PlayStation Network functionality and it has to be deployed there first before we can put the visual layer on top of it, so there's a couple of different schedule issues in that, but, we're on schedule for the Fall, as we said yesterday. Game launching, the ability to launch games directly from inside of Home, is in the next library update for developers, which will be in August."
Will Home be Feature Complete this Fall?
"It's hard to tell because we're still in the beta program, so I can't give you a definitive, but, also, it's unlike building a disc-based game, where you have to get everything on the disc and then ship it. What we're going is starting a service and a week later we can add a bit more functionality and a week after that we can add something else. There will be features that get added over time, it's not going to be everything that we've ever talked about at the beginning of the service. I'm being very clear we never intended for that to be the case, either, but we have a clear road map of where and how and when we're going to be adding functions and features."
On Countering Wii's Casual Draw
"We've had tremendous success with Singstar -- it's a $200 and something million dollar franchise for us, over 10 million units. I acknowledge the core of that audience is in Europe and it's still yet to establish itself strongly in the US, but we have some big strong plans for it this year. I think it's good that other companies are looking at that space, as well, because it will help grow the market. On a macroeconomic basis, if the industry is in good health because there are new consumers coming in, I'm not going to give you a format competitive response to that, because I think it's positive."
Wipeout HD a Stopgap?
"Let me be clear, Wipeout HD is a fully functioning game, full online multiplayer functionality. You'll be able to download additional tracks over time, but the core game experience is a fully featured game experience."
: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3161666
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