Evangelion Unit-01
Master Chief
PlayStation’s Jim Ryan: ‘We’re making a completely new VR format for PS5’ | British GQ (gq-magazine.co.uk)
Really good read. Excerpts below and more at the link.
Intro, Days Gone and more games coming to PC:
On PS5 supply:
On PS5 2021 Lineup:
GT7 Delayed to 2022:
On the new PS VR headset:
On PS games coming to PC:
Really good read. Excerpts below and more at the link.
Intro, Days Gone and more games coming to PC:
Jim Ryan has a lot to get off his chest. If we’re honest, it’s a lot more than we’d prepared for. You see, usually when you interview someone – not least the president and chief executive officer of Sony Interactive Entertainment – you go into that conversation with some semblance of what’s to come. So when we got offered 20 minutes with the PlayStation boss out of the blue last week, it did seem a bit too easy-going to be true. “A follow-up to our PS5-related chat last November,” we thought, “should be a breeze.”
Then the affable Geordie started dropping bombs. A follow-up to PlayStation VR? Confirmed with dev kits out in the wild and an “easy single-cord setup”. More free games for those stuck at home during the pandemic? Yep, Play At Home is back starting with 2016’s Ratchet & Clank and a three-month trial to anime subscription service Funimation with “some cool stuff with indie games” to follow. What about PlayStation games on PC? A whole slate of them is on the way starting with Days Gone this spring. And as for Sony’s publishing timetable for the year? Well, Covid has been up to no good again and booted Gran Turismo 7 back to 2022. Don’t worry, plans for the Uncharted movie and Last Of Us TV series are very much on track.
On PS5 supply:
GQ: Since we’ve got you here, when is everyone who wants to buy a PS5 going to be able to easily buy one?
Jim Ryan: All I can say is we’re working as hard as we possibly can. You may have read that we sold 4.5 million PS5s at the end of December – that’s more than we did PS4s in 2013 and that was the high watermark for the PlayStation generation. So, with everything in the world throughout last year, we feel like that was fairly decent. One in four of those who have bought a PlayStation 5 do not have a PS4 and those around about half are new to the PlayStation Network. So it’s really nice that we’re able to bring in people from outside.
I know there were people who wanted a PS5 and couldn’t find one. We’re very sorry about that and obviously grateful that demand has been as strong as it is.
On PS5 2021 Lineup:
Fair enough. We imagine you’ve got a roadmap for 2021 in terms of the games that you want to release. How fixed is that given the disruptions Covid-19 has caused to development? Returnal recently got pushed back a month.
Yeah, we’re feeling pretty good about Returnal, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Horizon Forbidden West. And, you know, there are two approaches to this: you can either hold the date and put out the game irrespective of quality or you can ship it when it’s right. We have always taken the latter approach. There have been some fairly high-profile instances of publishers trying the former approach.
That’s one way of putting it...
It never works at the best of times. But I think in this world, where creative people are working remotely, you’ve just got to respect the fact that that development needs to take what it needs to take and to get the games right.
GT7 Delayed to 2022:
So one game you didn’t mention there that had been dated for 2021 is Gran Turismo 7. What’s going on with that one?
At this point a PR representative for Sony jumped into the call promising a statement on GT7 – probably in the hope that we’d actually ask about some of the many new announcements. You can read that statement below...
“GT7 has been impacted by Covid-related production challenges and therefore will shift from 2021 to 2022. With the ongoing pandemic, it’s a dynamic and changing situation and some critical aspects of game production have been slowed over the past several months. We’ll share more specifics on GT7’s release date when available.”
On the new PS VR headset:
So the obvious question is what’s changed from the first headset?
So this will be a completely new VR format for PS5. PlayStation has considered VR as a strategic opportunity and a big innovation story. We think there are two themes that you’re going to see: us capturing the technological progress that has taken place since the present VR system came to market and a considerable amount of lessons learned. Because the present system was our first one. [Changes will be] things like moving to a very easy single-cord setup with this one and many other similar learnings. Dev kits are about to go out.
VR is getting a lot more traction now, but it’s still a nascent market. Why make a follow-up to the first headset?
We believe in VR and have been extremely happy with the results with the present PlayStation VR and think that we will do good business with our new VR system for PlayStation 5. More importantly, we see it as something beyond this coming iteration that really could be really big and really important. We like to innovate; we think our community likes us to innovate. I’d turn around the question and say, “Why not?” For us, it’s a very logical step to take. We’re very excited by it and we think that people who are going to make VR games for our new VR system are going to be very excited too.
On PS games coming to PC:
Fair enough. So releasing PlayStation games on PC was something that Sony PlayStation held back on for a long time. Now it sounds like you’re very much on that bandwagon. What changed?
I think a few things changed. We find ourselves now in early 2021 with our development studios and the games that they make in better shape than they’ve ever been before. Particularly from the latter half of the PS4 cycle our studios made some wonderful, great games. There’s an opportunity to expose those great games to a wider audience and recognise the economics of game development, which are not always straightforward. The cost of making games goes up with each cycle, as the calibre of the IP has improved. Also, our ease of making it available to non-console owners has grown. So it’s a fairly straightforward decision for us to make.
This is following on from your publishing Horizon Zero Dawn on PC in August last year. How did that go?
We assessed the exercise in two ways. Firstly, in terms of the straightforward success of the activity of publishing the game on PC, people liked it and they bought it. We also looked at it through the lens of what the PlayStation community thought about it. There was no massive adverse reaction to it. So we will continue to take mission steps in this direction.
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