Hirai: First-party studios must devise ‘envelope-pushing, genre-defining content’

In an interview with Sony’s blog ThreeSpeech, SCE boss Kaz Hirai has said the first party studios at the company have a responsibility to create platform defining content.

The topic came up when he was asked what he thought of the company’s policy of not paying for exclusives.

He said: "That’s something that we can re-evaluate, but it’s also something that the publishers need to make a business decision on. Ultimately, it becomes a dialogue – if it makes sense for them to go exclusive, that’s a business decision that they need to make. But generally speaking, because of the investments that publishers need to make in this round of hardware, it’s going to be more difficult for publishers to make that decision.

"Where we come into the picture is to have that dialogue with the third-party publishers, to say: “OK, what can we do together if it’s not exclusive that makes the PS3 version of the game more compelling for the consumers than any other version?” Let’s face it – all the games are coming out on a Blu-ray disk which has 50Gb capacity, so let’s put in some making-of content, or maybe additional levels. Also, it really becomes important for the first-party studios to really come up with some envelope-pushing, genre-defining content."

The full interview can be found here.