Next-Gen recently sat down for an exclusive interview with SCEA boss Kaz Hirai, to quiz him on the coming of PlayStation 3 and, specifically, the company's online strategy and why it doesn't have a name…
Just a month before the launch of the PlayStation 3 in the North American and the Japanese market, Hirai has pretty much all the pieces of the puzzle in place. Next-Gen asked him about the overall strategy, the online plans and SCEA's view of the competition…
Square Enix launches Final Fantasy X 25th anniversary site, revealing new Nomura art, books, music releases, and merchandise.
Look I know VIII has its issues and all that but how on earth can the do big anniversary events with new artwork and merchandise for VII, IX and X yet VIII got sweet f*** all.
They could have given it something during its 25th anniversary yet all it got was a single Happy Anniversary post on their social media.
they should know that we are OG fans of VIII as it sold truckload as well. not as much as VII or X. I personally didn't like IX but X and VI are my personal fav.
Shadow Hearts 2 covenant is another game I love. I hope one day someone can make remake, I would be delighted
Final Fantasy VIII is great and you are always the first to defend it in the comments
A brutal reset, a smarter story, and a return to what made it great—Mortal Kombat (2011) revived the series.
Underrated comment. I used to hate that game so much that any time my siblings asked me to play it, I just picked Hom and shut myself down mid-match.
15 years went by so fast. I remember playing through the story mode at launch.
Why did Sony push Shuhei Yoshida out of his role leading PlayStation's first-party games? He'd overseen some huge successes. Well, apparently, he didn't listen.
Yeah I can see that for sure. Shuhei Yoshida should have been in charge not Jim Ryan.
It should be free highway for him now.. but Sony are too stupid to see this, especially that moron Hulst
Wtf why all that anger. PlayStation is dominating on every level. Besides I think there is a little more to hiring a CEO than just who is available. Its not like its a athlete your team wants to buy.
S2Killinit
live service failures, chasing trends, closing studios. yes dominating
Sony is Dominating because competition is not existing. Compared to previous gens this is the poorest in terms of software offerings.
Last gen we got Uncharted 4 Lost Legacy and TLOU2 from ND alone.
This is so far a remasters gen, with no competition to lift up the quality
..."PlayStation is dominating on every level"....
...Really???
PlayStation are soon heading into a new generation in the not to distant future. They currently have the worst customer satisfaction they've ever sustained as a company. The company is heading for a huge crash while at the same time they'll need to be planning how they are going to try and win back that favour and the build up to their new releases.
Yes financially they're winning but they're going to have to ride out this complete public corporate disaster. No one has faith in the company or the product anymore. They've damaged their public image so much this generation. Greed can kill anyone.
He would've done the same thing and fire Jim Ryan and Shuhei would be the villain. Why?
Because Elite creates the narrative and distraction for gamers, users and citizens.
More confirmation that Jim Ryan is the culprit for what has happened to Sony. Hulst needs to go too. What sucks is that a lot of the good top heads at Sony are no longer there. I wish that guys that were forced out prematurely by Dumbo Jimbo like Shuhei and Layden came back.
Yep. Yoshida was responsible for bringing one of the best games of this generation to playstation (Stellar Blade). He is an actual gamer and is in touch with what gamers want (creative, fun games, not GaaS and agenda pushing). He also seems like a genuinely nice guy if you watch some interviews. Of course they got rid of him.
Makes you wonder if MS even thought about hiring him after Phil and Sarah were leaving. He certainly couldn't make their situation any worse.
All the gamer/consumer lead heads are gone across PS and Xbox. shuhei gone phil's gone (questionable) but gone. The future of gaming is somewhat uncertain across the board.
interesting interview.
Why couldn't he just answer the question? I want to know what service I will be having, will it be for sure free, will I have to make 30 different screen names to play each game? It's only a month away I want to know stuff...Oh well it's still going to be sweet.
he dodges the question because he doesn't know, but at least he has a "philosophy".
it's a month from launch kaz, we should know a lot more about your online service by now.
although if you read carefully on his doublespeak it makes sense:
"This is a platform that we are presenting to the publishing community. All the publishers will be able to take advantage of this and become a part of the online experience of our service. We are trying to offer as many options as possible, for example in the area of billing for the downloadable content if the publisher is a smaller publisher and they want to offer this kind of content, we can do the billing for them. On the other hand if they are a big publisher and they have their own billing system or strategy we can accommodate that business model as well. We are trying to be as flexible as possible and we are trying to match up with the business needs of all the publishers. "
so basically, the online service will be different for each publisher..I can see why they want it that way, it was such a huge success with the ps2.
But the idea of integrating the network part as a part of the whole service sounds good. No need to have a separate Live if it's there all the time.
You mean like PayPal? for example, if you don't want to pay a fee and can get your own merchant account from a bank at a lower rate? Well these options may be good for the developers but under no circumstances is good for the gamers. The same goes on giving too many options to the developers to implement the online game play. Here is the reason why?
1) You will have to enter your payment information for each developer you want to purchase content from.
2) Each developer will have their own policy when it comes to downloadable content (i.e. you can only download the content x days after purchase, like they do now).
3) If not profitable to the developer, your game server may be shut down sooner to make room for other games or to force to buy their latest sequel.
It is obvious that Sony knows it is too expensive to built and maintain a centralize system like xbox live therefore is trying to find ways to come up with a solution to not look "too" bad. I hope they realize the nature of consoles. Consoles are not PC, and we don't want another PC, most of us have a computer anyways. The last thing we want is to have the same annoyances we have on the PC into our living rooms. Consoles managed to stay away from these by having a very controlled environment and rules that each individual developer has to follow. It seems like Sony is trying to break that. If they do, it may be a bad Idea. They will position themselves in a collision course against the PC. They may have a chance against the 360 but against the PC? Soon the PC will/is supporting the XBox 360 control, wheel, vision camera, maybe HD-DVD, games for windows, xna, directX 10, live Anywhere, etc. Microsoft is dying for Sony to do this. If you look closely at Microsoft strategy you will see that they are making the PC a high end Xbox, supporting everything the xbox 360 supports (including peripherals and service), eventually people will be able to say, “I can choose between the core, premium, and vista” vista being the best value.
Sony should stop trying to make the PS3 seem as a computer. This may sound like a good thing today, since the PS3 can be considered a high end computer. But in 1-2 years the PC will surpass the PS3 in hardware and will make it seem obsolete. And if the PS3 is a computer who's going to want an obsolete computer 1-2 years from now?
I know sony fanboys will disagree with this, but most people don't like to hear the truth.