PlayStation 4 boss Jim Ryan interview – ‘these are our policies and we intend to stick by them’
Tuesday 18 Jun 2013 12:00 pm
Jim Ryan – he sounds just like actor Brian CoxJim Ryan – in charge of the PlayStation 4 in Europe
GameCentral interviews the CEO of PlayStation Europe, about Sony’s commitment to used games and the PS4’s future games (including The Last Guardian).
The first time we met Jim Ryan, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, was at the official unveiling of the PlayStation 4 back in February. That was only a round table interview but we were very impressed then by his plain-talking and willingness to engage with our questions.
Last week we took advantage of his naturally buoyant mood on the morning after the PlayStation E3 media briefing, asking him to clarify not only Sony’s position on used games but how it intends to keep publishers onside and ensure a steady stream of quality games for the new system…
GC: I’ve been to a lot of E3 conferences but I’ve never seen anything like last night, with the chanting and the genuine… relief, not just happiness, from the crowd. Is that the response you expected, because the intensity of the reaction certainly seemed to take [PlayStation America boss] Jack Tretton by surprise. Which kind of implies even Sony didn’t quite appreciate just how important these issues were to people.
JR: It’s an interesting question. I’ve been attending these things for nigh on 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like it, for us or anybody else – platform holder or publisher. I think we were very confident in what we had to say, but I don’t think we were expecting quite the level of enthusiasm that manifested itself.
GC: The flipside of that euphoria though is that if you ever renege on any of that you’ll be crucified. Are you happy now for Sony in general, and the PlayStation division in particular, to be seen as… I can only paraphrase Andrew House at the end where he said, ‘We’re fighting for consumer rights’. Because that is not what you expect a global corporation to be saying and I just worry that some people within Sony might see these issues only as buzzwords or a temporary means of getting one up on your competitors.
JR: I can see why someone might put that interpretation on it, but if you look at the two… put aside the issue of price, which is a perfectly rational human reaction to a price that’s lower than that of our competitor. But if you take the two points that got everyone so excited when Jack was on stage – the used game policy and the need not to be always connected – those are things that we decided upon well before the furore of the last couple of weeks. Those are matters of policy that we determined were appropriate for our platform.
It’s interesting that you reference that last closing bit of Andy’s, I liked the bit where he spoke about have to gain or regain the trust of consumers. I thought that was very important, and you sort of mentioned the possibility that some of the stuff might be ephemeral – that there might be some small print somewhere – to the best of my knowledge, which I wouldn’t say is considerable but it’s probably as considerable as anybody’s, there isn’t any.
I mean who knows, some force majeure situation comes up years down the road – nothing’s forever necessarily – but these are our policies and we intend to stick by them.
GC: In February you did imply this was your policy but, for whatever reason, there was some fairly vague language used, which got some people worried when you didn’t say anything more after the Xbox One unveil. So I wonder, was there any policy changes between February and now?
JR: February was platform unveil and the discussion was very much at the level, and as time passes, and you get closer to launch, you get increasing levels of granularity on some of these topics. A number of people today have said that what we did today was having a dig at our competition, and I can understand why somebody would say that, but I prefer to interpret it as legitimately addressing something where there’d been a huge amount of consumer perturbation over the past couple of weeks. And we just wanted to clarify what our position was on those two points that were palpably very important to consumers.
GC: I wrote an editorial before E3 which warned readers that there are only two constants in the games industry: that companies never learn from their own, or anyone else’s, mistakes and that they always miss an open goal.
[Sustained and knowing laughter from both Jim Ryan and his PR handler]
GC: I think one of the reasons this situation seems so unusual is that a company, Sony in this instance, made neither of those common mistakes.
JR: Your editorial sounds somewhat cynical but if you based your observations on things that have happened in the past they’re not unreasonable. [laughs] But we have certainly learnt our lessons from the PS3. And there are a number things that occurred that time round that we do not intend to happen again. And I think some of the things that we’ve done in February and then again yesterday indicate that we have learnt those lessons.
GC: And in a similar manner there’s also a cycle of console manufacturer dominance, and publisher dominance as well, where a company does very well and it’s justifiably successful, and then it gets arrogant, and then it makes seemingly obvious – often anti-consumer – mistakes, then it does very badly, and then it realises its mistake, starts making an effort again, and the cycle repeats.
JR: You could be talking about Sony couldn’t you? [laughs]
GC: It’s not just Sony! You can see it with any company, with EA, with Nintendo… With Microsoft it really seems that they’re at the top of arrogance curve at the moment and Sony, it seems, are in the consumer-friendly part of the graph. Is that something you would acknowledge at all? And if so what are you going to do when you get back to the top? Will you be the first one to break the cycle and not be arrogant when you’re doing well?
JR: [Considerable laughter] It’s an interesting, if somewhat hypothetical, question. The problem is you never know when you’re at the top…
GC: You must’ve have had a pretty good idea with the PlayStation 2…
JR: [laughs] Yeah, and you know with hindsight we were at the top in those days and probably had we not been there we may have done some things a little differently at the start of the life of the PS3.
GC: OK, well that was my idea of being congratulatory…
All: [laughs]
JR: [laughs] I’d hate to see you when you’re being critical.
GC: I’m only playing devil’s advocate! But genuinely I was very pleased with your announcements, purely from a consumer point of view and regardless even of whether you were talking about games or not. But what I also found interesting is that I would say on a game-by-game basis, particularly in terms of exclusives, Microsoft probably had the better of the two media briefings. And I can see an enormous caveat in that there seem to be a large number of first party Sony developers that haven’t announced anything yet for the PS4, but the fact that there isn’t an obvious killer app yet for the PlayStation 4 does seem to be your Achilles heel.
JR: First of all, in response to your observation that they had the better of it yesterday – which is understandable. It’s understandable… but I’m not saying I agree with it. I’d just point out that we unveiled a very large number of games at the February 20th event and at their equivalent launch event, for their own reasons – which may be perfectly good reasons – they did not focus so heavily on gaming. So obviously their powder was drier than our powder. But I think if you look at the piece cumulatively I would say we were at least competitive.
GC: Oh sure, I’m not suggesting you were very far behind. But my particular concern, which I may have voiced in February, is the nature of some of the titles that were announced. I just… again they’re not bad franchises per se but Killzone and inFamous just don’t seem to justify the level of prominence you’re giving them, given the quality and level of success of their predecessors.
JR: I’ll tell the developers you said that. [laughs]
GC: Well… I get a lot of letters in from readers asking for sequels to one game or another and no one that I can recall has ever asked for more Killzone or inFamous. Why were they the titles you lead with, rather than major new IP or more popular sequels?
JR: There is new IP, there’s Knack and there’s Driveclub – so two out of the three games that we will launch with are new IP. Killzone, your readers may not care unduly for it but it is one of our….
GC: Now I’m going to get tons of irate letters from Killzone fans!
JR: [laughs]
GC: But again, I don’t want to pretend it’s a terrible game or anything. But… is this part of a bigger plan for your release schedule? I’d be perfectly okay with Killzone being merely the start of a constant stream of first party releases, but if it and inFamous are all we’re getting from Sony for the first six months…
JR: Yes…
GC: And before you say yes…
JR: I already did! [laughs]
GC: Before you try and convince me that the answer is yes all I’m thinking of is the launch of the 3DS, PS Vita, and Wii U where exactly the same things were implied and the very opposite was true…
JR: Well you know, 70 million PS3s probably says you we’ve got a pretty good chance of it. I think relative to the platforms you’ve just mentioned, when you look at the scale of consumer interest you look at the volume of pre-order business that’s been done. And some of that’s just people writing their name down on a form, but a lot of it’s people putting £50 down – so that’s serious intent.
I think, and I’ll be quite honest, who knows where it’ll end up in four or five years’ time but I think we’re going to get off to a damn good start and in this business momentum is all. If you get the momentum going and you get all the publishers and developers behind you, you might not be guaranteed success but you’ve got a very good chance.
GC: So you’re confident that that supply line of quality games is already in place? You won’t have a good launch and then nothing for six months?
JR: Not at all. And the statistic was quoted yesterday, I think it was 140 games in the first year. And the majority of those will come in the back end of 2014.
GC: So you claim that your polices on used games was settled some time ago, but the assumption has been, and I think it’s a fairly logical one, that publishers came to you and they suggested these ideas. They said something like, ‘We need to stop second-hand games, because we’re losing so much money to them.’ Did that really not happen? Because there must’ve been some pretty intense discussions along those lines with Microsoft, and it’s impossible to imagine they didn’t then come to you afterwards.
JR: I can’t speak to any conversation that might have taken place between Microsoft and the publishing community. But by the way, I’m still uncertain as to whether there is a definitive statement from Microsoft as to what they are really doing. There’s been various stuff spoken about but I’m not sure they’ve come out an unequivocally said, ‘This is it’.
GC: Well… they are certainly having trouble explaining themselves. But they’ve put a lot of the onus on the publishers, saying they won’t do many of the more unpopular things but that publishers still have the option if they want. That makes it very hard to imagine they haven’t been talking to them about these issues and it also makes it hard to imagine that Sony hasn’t been having similar conversations.
JR: Publishers are our major partners, we talk to them on a very regular basis – we listen to what they say. At the end of the day they have to provide an account to their shareholders and the single biggest factor that influences whether they make money, on either individual titles or a portfolio, is the size of the installed base that they’re publishing on. And that dwarfs everything else. If you get a spreadsheet out, which we obviously don’t have time for, I could demonstrate it to you.
So, yes there is a certain common knowledge that there is unhappiness within the publishing community over the fact that they do not participate in the second-hand business. However, if you offer any publisher a choice between an installed base of X – where X is a very large number – with the status quo on the second-hand disc-based model or 50 per cent of X and some sort of putative cut of the second-hand business I can predict with 100 per cent certainty what they would take.
GC: I do understand publisher concerns over second-hand games – no one wants to see more companies go under – but is there any way you can think to address the problem that doesn’t have a negative effect on customers? I don’t know if some across-the-board change in game prices would help?
JR: The single biggest thing is to energise the population at large that the install base of these things is measured in the UK in the many millions, and across Europe in the tens of millions. And that’s what we have to do, and if we do that the publishers will… You know every stakeholder is struggling right now, retailers are… you operate out of the UK so you’ll know the retail market there is probably harsher than the publishing environment.
The problem is that the cake is small and our job as a platform holder is to allow for an environment where the cake can be large. And those who participate can… even if it’s a small piece of a large cake, that’s better than a medium piece of a very small cake. It’s turning into an economics lesson isn’t it! [laughs]
GC: So if there is this status quo you’re maintaining how do you stop the current problems continuing? Is there something built into the PlayStation 4 or its polices that might help? Is this why you’re so engaged in the indie side of things?
JR: Obviously two very different business activities, publishing and development. I was going to make the observation that as regards developers… it’s got a bit like the movie business where the big games are getting absolutely enormous and need development teams in the hundreds and development budgets in the tens of millions…
GC: But is that an issue that needs to be addressed? Because if that continues on an infinite scale there’s going to become a point where the figures don’t add up. And some worry that we’re there already.
JR: No, I think it’s just the Darwinian nature of the way the industry’s going. But I think what is important, and I think we made a fairly clear statement about this, is that we provide an environment where the smaller groups of developers – people who are enthusiastic and passionate about developing games – there is an environment where they can do that and do that safely and, hopefully, profitably. And Microsoft said some words, we said something, and I’d argue our commitment has been good in this area, over the past two or three years. And we intend to continue that.
GC: But again, if the status quo is to continue how are you going to attract a larger and wider audience to your console? I’m not convinced motion controls haven’t already been proven a fad, so if they aren’t going to attract the mass market what is?
JR: As platform holder it’s down to the creators of the content and the publishers of that content to come up with stuff. We are a legitimate and powerful developer and publisher in our own right. We have stuff in the pipeline which we’re not going to talk about today, the intent of which is to broaden the demographic and allow us to go younger, as we have done successfully on the PS2, and attract other groups as well.
GC: I must say the line-up on the PlayStation 3 last night was very impressive: only one sequel and an excellent diversity of other titles. Is that just an accident of where those games ended up or is that some kind of statement of intent for the breadth of titles you want for the PlayStation 4 as well?
JR: The PS2 we kept going for 13 years, we’re only seven in for PS3 so with an installed base of 70 million you’d be a fool not to want to publish to that still.
GC: But other publishers, and you yourself in the early days of the PS3, didn’t have that variety of games, don’t have the equivalents of The Last Of Us and Beyond…
JR: Maybe that’s why some of them are struggling.
GC: Good point, well thank you for your time. Oh, I forgot the obligatory Last Guardian question!
All: [laughs]
PR guy: You’re the first person to ask as well!
JR: We might have more news on that… no news this E3…
GC: It does still exist though? It hasn’t been cancelled?
PR guy: It does exist.
GC: Okay, well thank you very much. You’ve been a great sport. I don’t know about you but I thoroughly enjoy that.
JR: [laughs] Not at all, it was good to speak to you again.
