On Backwards Compatibility

At launch, PlayStation 3 was quite pricey. The machine is extremely expensive to build. We had to look at ways of keeping the costs in check. Software emulation wasn’t all that expensive. But hardware backwards compatibility might have meant the sacrifice of USB ports or wireless connectivity. The common feeling internally was that backwards compatibility is a nice thing to have but as you moved out beyond launch there were going to be less times when somebody pulled out a PS2 game and put it in their machine

On the Prospect of a $99 PS2

It’s just another card that can be played. But I want to understand the consumer that says ‘$129, too rich for my blood, but $99, I’m all over it’. How much software are they ultimately going to buy? If that $30 was the difference between buying a console and not buying a console, how many games are you going to sell to that person?

While I value every consumer I just don’t know if that consumer is really going to be strategically important to the software development community and to us.

If your next question is, ‘when are you going to discontinue the PS2’, we’re going to discontinue the PS2 when nobody else wants to buy it and that’s going to happen when nobody else wants to build games for it and I don’t look forward to that day if it ever comes.

On the Fanboy Community

I get nervous every time I open my mouth. I’d love to tell you that I don’t read all this stuff. But the fact is, I bleed with every word that’s written. I care about some unknown guy that responds to a blog, and trashes something I said. But it’s tough to make everybody in your family love you, let alone everybody in the world, so it’s just the price of admission. But yeah it freaks me out, no question about it.