Pretty interesting interview of Shu Yoshida, the president of Sony Game Development Studios. But this caught my attention.
VB: How do you view Nintendo’s success? Do you want their gamers?
SY: Yes. It’s a great success story. They’re focused on easy to pick up games. With great game play. At one point, Nintendo decided in the last generation that they wanted mature audiences on the GameCube. That made it crowded. With the Wii, they then made the decision to focus on what they do best. That really helped separate the focus of the three platforms in this generation. That is helping the growth of this industry. I think Nintendo did well for themselves and they are bringing in new gamers to the industry for all of us.
Some other items of interest. He really makes it sound like high budget games are not as fun to work on. Also interesting that he uses an iPhone.
VB: Is game development getting more expensive?
SY: Very much so. That’s why we are having fun with PSN titles. The big disk-based titles are so much work. In the past, when we sold a million units of any game, that was great. But now a million is the breakeven point in disk games. It’s a very stressful business these days. It’s much more fun working on small titles on PSN on less than $1 million budgets. As any producer would do, we look at concepts and decide whether titles are in too small a niche for the Blu-ray disk games (which are far deeper than the casual fare on the PlayStation Network.)
But for PSN, we can proceed.
VB: What is the minimum a game has to sell these days?
SY: Disk-based games? I would say a million. If you spend $20 million to $30 million, with marketing investment, margins of $35 or $40 on a $60 game, then the recoup point is really high. It depends on the platform. For PSN games, it is $2 million tops. That is a more relaxing experience.
VB: What’s the expectation for the mix of first party and third party?
SY: We have been very modest as a first party group throughout the history of PlayStation. But first-party presence is important to show what the platform can do. We complement the third parties. In time, we would target 20 percent first-party as a good number. It’s easy to increase the first-party market share if the platform is failing. Third parties would just stop making games. Higher market share for first party wouldn’t mean it’s doing good. We need a balance.
VB: Today, many of the most interesting things in games have to do with social networks. Social gaming summits are drawing a lot of people. Non-game companies are jumping into social games. Should Sony invest in those?
SY: From the platform view, I upgraded my iPhone to the new OS. I downloaded a bunch of applications. Some of the non-game applications are fun. These things are as much entertainment as games are. When we started our company, we called it Sony Computer Entertainment. We didn’t call it a game company. The vision was to use computing to make something entertaining. In that sense, we always try to redefine what a game is. So we are very excited about social networking. It’s engaging and fun for us as well. That’s why in this generation, we have to engage better with consumers on user-generated content, sharing and critiquing. We can use these to make our games more fun.
