The State of PlayStation Network

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3561/the_state_of_playstation_network_.php

The State of PlayStation Network: John Hight Interviewed


A lot of ink has been given to the massive success and appeal of the
Xbox Live Arcade as a platform for gamers, developers and publishers.
Details about Sony's PlayStation Network, which has both first-party
and third-party publishing options, have been harder to come by.

Here, in an interview conducted at GDC, we quizzed John Hight, SCEA's
director of product development for its first-party published digital
games based in its Santa Monica studio. The vast majority of the major
'indie'-style PSN titles such as Everyday Shooter and fl0w are hand-
picked by Sony and first-party published - though Sony is also
starting to further push its third-party publishing arm, based out of
Foster City.

In the chat, however, first-party supremo Hight talks about the
company's philosophy towards fostering 'signature' indie developers,
why the platform is better-suited to indie development and publishing
than the 360, and future plans for the service -- including support
for Japanese PlayStation games.

I'm curious to know how the model for payment and UI for PSN has been
evolving over the year-plus, and where it's going in the future in
terms of simplification of interface and all of that to help digital
games get distribution easier.

John Hight: You're talking about on the network platform itself, and
the store?

Yeah.

JH: I'm not the best person to answer that. I'll answer what I know,
but we actually have some folks who are specifically responsible for
that.

We give them a lot of feedback based on how our customers are reacting
to things, and I think you will see a pretty big change in the
PlayStation Network in the early part of April, where we roll out some
new interface stuff largely based on customer feedback.

Simplification, cutting down on the number of mouse clicks, making it
easier to find stuff that you want to find... that's kind of an
outgrowth of us having more content now, so we have to make sure that
you can get at it easily.

There seems to me to be a kind of aggressive push now for more content
from the Sony side. Is that accurate, would you say?

JH: No. I would say that we're always pretty careful about how much we
put on the network.

We're very careful about how too much quantity could kill us, because
it's more about having really well-selected, cool experiences. I guess
we're aggressive in the sense that we're out there looking at a lot of
things.

I'm looking at 20 proposals a month, and I only see the stuff that
gets filtered through some of my producers. We're definitely trying to
talk to everybody out there, and sometimes even if we're not into a
particular game or it doesn't fit, we like to have the relationship,
because we'd like to hear about what the next game is.


Have you been down to the Independent Games Festival pavilion yet?

JH: I have, yeah.

What have you liked down there? Not that it's any indication that
you're going to sign them or anything.

JH: It was funny. I liked The Adventures of PB Winterbottom. It's
funny, because those guys are in my class [at USC] right now, and
they've been so timid about showing me their game, saying, "Well, you
know, we're going to be up at IGF, so if you would..." -- and they
call me Professor Hight, it's pretty funny -- "if you would stop by,
we'd appreciate it."

And it's cool. It's a fun little game. I wouldn't say anything if that
wasn't the case. In case they're listening, this does not necessarily
mean that they're going to get an A in the class. (laughs) It's no
guarantee. So I definitely like that. And it's interesting.

There are two goo games there. There's World of Goo and Goo, both of
which I liked. The Goo game itself I think was a little more engaging
for me, because it's fluid and organic, and it seemed a little bit
easier to pick up and play. The Fez game was cool. I played that.

Gosh, I'm trying to remember. There's a lot of neat stuff, and it
seems to be in general the quality level across the board is better
than last year. Each year, it keeps getting a little bit better, and
it's very encouraging.

I saw that too. It seemed like the level's coming up a little bit. I
was especially impressed, just looking at the awards show last night,
looking at the visuals of the Student Showcase games, because it was
leaps and bounds. I felt bad that I hadn't played any of them. I was
like, "Wow, these look amazing."

Here's a loaded question: What are you going to do to beat Microsoft
in this space? And Nintendo as well, as they get into it.

JH: In terms of our objectives, we've already beat them, and I think
we are vindicated in our strategy, because long before it seemed to be
this popular cause to go after the indies for new content, we focused
on that right off the bat.

We wanted innovation, we wanted stylish games, and we wanted things
that were new and fresh and cool for our customers. We sought this
space out two years ago, before we even launched the PlayStation
Network.

I think it's very cool that all publishers are now considering this,
because that's what it's all about. It's a low-risk area. It's a place
where young people can come into the industry and try out their ideas
and not have to go through the usual course of working through a big
publisher as QA for the next five years.

Plus, they're getting a broad exposure to everything: producing,
coding, sound, music, and putting it all together. It's much easier to
learn working on it in a smaller game than it is to work in one part
of a larger game.

I do think that Microsoft did get some indie stuff early on, like
Cloning Clyde. But you have a different approach, wherein a project
will be found and it will be developed with Sony.

JH: Yeah. It's one thing to go out and sign up things, but you want to
ensure success. We look at our developers as long-term relationships,
so we put in whatever resources we need.

In the case of the guys who work with me, typically we have a producer
and a designer. These are all seasoned people who have had 10 or 15
years of experience, and they know their job is to mentor these
developers. And they take it seriously.

The success of their teams is their personal success, and they don't
try to co-opt the ideas of their team. By the same token, they don't
just toss in an SDK and say, "Hey, I'll get back to you later." They
really spend a lot of time with them.

Is that a model that you plan to continue?

JH: Absolutely. Yeah, it's been successful. We're not going to do a
ton of games, but we're trying to make every game its own unique, cool
experience. We're going to continue to focus on teams that we see as
having a lot of potential, and we hope to grow with them.

What do you see as the benefits of releasing games as they are done,
versus specific, spaced-out gated times?

JH: It isn't completely just as they come out, but for us, it's about
making sure each game has the time to be refined. These are not
downloadable games on your PC. They're on your console, and the
expectation from a consumer standpoint is, "These things can't crash.
These things can't drop a virus on my machine." They have to have the
same solid, rigid QA that we put in all of our console games and our
Blu-ray titles.

Plus, when we release, we release worldwide, so that means 21
languages in Europe, 4 or 5 languages in Asia... and we'd like to --
we've gotten a lot of feedback from our customers -- they don't like
it when you delay and release it in the United States, and then when
localization's done, in Europe, then we release... we're trying to
coordinate it all so that it's a simultaneous worldwide release.

But games have their momentum. You don't want to sit too long on them.
I try not to double-up and release two things at once, because one
gets to have its air time.

I meant more on that last point, I guess: releasing the game when it's
done, versus queuing in any way.

JH: We try to do simultaneous release, but we're also cognizant that
these are small developers, and while we do support them, at least in
the first party, we support them through financial advances to fund
the game.

In our third party side, a lot of these developers are self-funded, so
you can't just have them hanging out on a line for months with no
royalty income coming in. You want to make sure that you release it in
time, so they can start earning earnings back on their work.


What do you see as the future of retail versus download titles? A lot
more download stuff is coming, but a lot of people seem a bit cagey
about going against retail. What do you think?

JH: Well, people are still very comfortable going to a store and
buying a game. We experimented with that with Warhawk, when we
released both, and I think we had a lot of success with it. To make
our retail partners happy, we gave them a value-add. They had a
headset that came along with the game. And we sold more at retail than
we did on download.

I think what's cool about the download space is that we can release
games that would just be noise for retailers. They'll take lower-cost
jewel case games aimed at children on the PC side, but those aren't
the games we typically do. We have higher quality games.

There's no mechanism to get a $10 game to you right now other than
online, but the neat thing about it is that we can drive people back
to retail with games like Warhawk, because now our customers hopefully
realize that when we release one of these games, we're going to back
it up with continued online content. We just released an expansion on
Warhawk in September, and we'll release another one in April. Each one
makes the game bigger and bigger.

It seems to me that retail has too much control for not being game
developers, of what comes out in terms of games. You couldn't release
flOw in retail as a boxed product for PS3. I don't know. It's a pet
peeve of mine that people want to still please the retailers when
they're making a lot more money off of games that developers sometimes
make.

JH: Well, they take a huge risk. They're carrying an inventory. They
don't know whether the customer's going to like the game or not, yet
they're sitting on stacks of boxes of these things, and they've got to
maintain stores, keep the lights on, keep the workers paid, yadda
yadda yadda. And our costs for direct distribution are minimal.

We have a significant investment in the PS3 and establishing the
network, no doubt, but basically, I'm not carrying an inventory
around. When you purchase that game from me, boom, we download it from
the servers, so the distribution costs are very low. We pass those
savings along to our customers.

I understand the retail side of things, and we couldn't be here
without them. That's important. And there will always be a place for
big, epic games like God of War, where it's an event. You want to go
to the store and be there at midnight when it goes up on the shelves
and be one of the first people that play through it and brag to your
friends about it. Those are fun. Those are fun events.

I mean, where are you going to get your hardware, you know? (laughs) A
lot of the times, when you buy that hardware, you're going to buy a
game along with it, and I don't think we're going to see retail just
go away.

I don't think digital distribution is going to cut them out
completely, and I don't think that will necessarily be the right
thing. I mean, a lot of things have been available for a long time
online, like with Amazon.com, and they haven't killed the book
business. People still like going to a bookstore and hanging out,
perusing.

Also, there seems to be an attempt with downloadable services to
emulate a storefront, so you can still sort of browse. It's arguably a
better experience, because you can actually play it before you buy it.

JH: Yeah. I think with these types of games, this is absolutely the
right space to be selling them. We could not have gotten flOw to the
consumer if we did not have PlayStation Network.


This is something that's probably not your area of expertise, but do
you know if we will ever see any of the Japanese PlayStation 1 titles
coming over here within the PlayStation Store? I know it's not quite
your area.

JH: I'm pretty darn sure they will, but I don't know which titles.

So it'll be title-by-title. You won't just open the store up,
necessarily.

JH: And here's the deal. Even with those titles, you want to make sure
that they look good and play fine, but there are rights issues.
Unfortunately, our legal team has to go through and determine, "Okay,
what exactly are the rights on this?"

I don't think they ever contemplated, in that time, having a digital
distribution for the titles, so a lot of it is going back and clearing
it up with the original authors and making sure they're okay with us
selling each game.

I'm pretty impressed with the ability to download some of these games
to the PSP. Do you think that we'll be able to see more original
titles downloadable from the PS3 to the PSP?

JH: Yeah. We actually have a couple that are at least in concept phase
right now.

That's quite a good thing, for me anyway. I play on the train most of
the time, so I've been waiting for a vehicle through which we can get
smaller-type game content in that sort of way. So keep doing that.
(laughs)

JH: Well yeah, we want to see things that are made for the PSP. It has
a unique interface, and games always feel better when they're built
for that particular platform.

Have you heard anything about WiiWare yet? What I've heard is that it
will be releasing games on a larger scale. Like, the only limitation
is something like one game per publisher per month, or something like
that. I don't know how much you've heard about it.

JH: No. Unfortunately, I really don't.

Are you worried about mindshare? Because they have a dominant number
of platforms.

JH: I think a lot of the gamers that we work with on things that we
look for in games... we're always looking at the visual side,
gameplay, and audio, and I think the PS3 is unquestionably the most
powerful hardware out there. What that translates to for our artists
is that they can really make some beautiful stuff.

I think that we've tried to break the mentality people have of
downloadable games somehow being for kids, or trivial, or are somehow
of a lesser quality than their counterparts that are selling for $60.
Instead, they're different. There's different gameplay.

They're little capsules of gameplay that are very specific, and they
entertain in one particular area. But the quality overall is very
high. With flOw, it's full 3D graphics, 1080p, 60 hertz, THX sound. I
think that's what makes that a worthy experience.

I don't think we're necessarily going to talk to the same developers.
I think that some games will probably be well-suited for the audience
Nintendo has found. I don't know that we have exactly the same
audience for our two platforms.

How much are you doing to help these independent developers figure out
how to develop on the PS3, and use the SPUs, and things like that?

JH: In first-party, we provide the hardware, and we usually give them
hands-on. They get to work with our designers and our tech directors.
So they get a lot of information about it. But it's not that arduous.

People try to portray the PS3 as this very difficult beast to develop
for, and the reality is that Kellee and Jenova at thatgamecompany got
their PS3 dev kit really early on, and within a month's time, had flOw
up and running. And they'd never made a console game before. Jonathan
Mak, within three weeks' time, he had Everyday Shooter running on the
PS3, and he's a solo everyman.

I think that while there isn't a huge toolset that's being provided
with the PS3 -- we have some very good tools now, those early
developers didn't have so much, but we have some good tools now -- but
I think it's more than that. There isn't any baggage. You can get
right to the iron. You know what you're telling the machine to do, and
for most developers, that's very liberating.

It's that last twenty percent of trying to get all the bugs worked out
of the game, and of making the game look pretty and be responsive.
After all, these are supposed to be real-time experiences, and not low-
framerate.

If you're working through a fairly large SDK where a lot of things get
included that you don't necessarily need for your game, it's going to
be very confusing on what to rip out and what not to have in there.
And even just for debugging, it's like, "Hey, is it my problem, or is
it somewhere in this black box?"

The cool thing about the approach that we have, is that it requires
you know a little bit about programming. It doesn't write the game for
you. But it does give you a lot of power over the hardware. It's a
different architecture. With last generation, you could kind of come
up with an engine that would work across all three platforms and get
reasonably good results, but now, the machine's so powerful and so
different that if you really want to take advantage of it, you have to
write specifically for the PS3.

I think that's mostly what those people are talking about when they
say that it's difficult. Also, how much did flOw and Everyday Shooter
use the SPUs?

JH: To some degree they do, sure.

Not as much as [thatgamecompany's next game] Flower is, perhaps?

JH: They're OpenGL, and they're using our solution, which is PSGL,
which is a great renderer. Flower looks awesome.

I know, from talking to them, that thatgamecompany's developers have
since figured out how to use the SPUs, but I think with smaller games,
it's in fact easier to develop on the PS3, because you don't
necessarily have to.

JH: That was part of our strategy with them. We felt like with flOw,
we'd allow them to get their feet wet, understand the mechanics of
building the game. We didn't think it would be a good idea for them to
take on some sort of heavy, 3D world in their first game. But now that
they've got that under their belts, here we are a year later, and now
they can, and the proof is in Flower. It looks great.

The thing that's just really cool for me right now is that this is
kind of how I got started in games. I got started back in the early
'90s. It was an era when I could make an entire game myself, or with
one other person. It was an era of experimentation.

A lot of the games that you see now, the first person shooters, Castle
Wolfenstein, that was [originally] an experimentation. Doom was one of
the early experiments on direct distribution of games. It's neat to
see this stuff happening again.

I think the outgrowth of this is that you are going to see just
incredible diversity, and the things that we consider genres now --
because we're so accustomed to seeing multiple games done with the
same mechanic -- we're really going to be busting genres.

You're going to see a blurring of lines and this movement, this
convergence in technology and the fact that universities and other
places are taking game development seriously and preparing people for
doing it, is just a wonderful time to be in.

Yeah, it seems like art games are going to come more from the
independent side than from the large-scale side. It certainly has
started to be the case now.

Yeah, you're right. We treat our developers like artists. That's our
intent. And that's the best way to treat them. This is what it's all
about. You have a vision for doing something, and then it's a matter
of finding the audience.