At this year’s Fan Expo Canada, we had a brief opportunity to sit down with SCE Canada’s Director of Public Relations and Marketing Matt Levitan to ask a few questions about the upcoming release of the PS4.
COG: For those who are undecided, why should they buy a PS4 over your competitor?
Matt Levitan: I think we’ve stayed very true to our plan. We certainly said from the beginning that this console generation for us was about two things: Listening to gamers and listening to developers. I think when it comes down to it, we built our chipset with developers in mind so they can build great games out of the gate, it wouldn’t be too expensive to make games and it wouldn’t take them years to learn how to build things like it was for the cell processor, which can be quite difficult.
From a gamers prospective, we certainly saw some of the things that we struggled with the PS3 launch. The fact that it was $550 – $650 for the 20 or 60 Gig and the fact that we didn’t have great games at launch. We took a lot of that to heart and we decided that this generation we wanted to what’s best for gamers, not only from a business perspective but from a software perspective too. Embracing the indie community, putting our own money into our own first party development, things like WorldWide Studios and Naughty Dog. I think our commitment to gamers is hopefully starting to be seen by a lot of people. I don’t want people to say that we are synonymous with games, but I want people to start to have that appreciation for PlayStation, as we have their best interests in mind, and we will be spending this entire generation making decisions for what they truly love, which is the gaming world.
COG: I know for myself (John), and for my fellow gamers, community is a huge thing, there is a bit of an unknown as to how community/social media is going to work on the PS4.
Matt Levitan: I heard people describe it that we are trying to build Facebook for console gaming. It’s not that specifically, but it is a lot richer profiling and there is a lot more interpersonal communication. You can actually find me by Matt Levitan, and not necessarily by my PSN name, so you can actually look me up, and if you know me in real life you can add me as a friend, and then not only voice or video chat with me, but you can actually watch me play games, and if you like the game that I’m playing, you can hop in and play with me or take over my controller and finish a level for me. It’s a lot more social that way, not just multiplayer like it is today, somewhat random. I think you’re really going to have the chance to build your group of friends, to enjoy your console with your friends a lot more.
My favourite feature is the option to watch a game first before I decide I want to play. A lot of times in a fighting game, for example, watching two people fight, if you don’t like their moves or you don’t like the way they’re fighting, they’re doing a lot of cheat moves, you can choose not to fight that guy, but if it looks like a good challenge, someone your level, you can be like “Hey, I want to challenge you!” rather than randomly getting setup with someone and they may be better than you or not as good. You can watch a match live and literally peer in to see them play and figure out if you want to skip or be next, the same way as you would in an arcade, like back in the old days when you put your quarter on the machine. It’s a lot like that now, you watch someone play and say “I got next.”
COG: Many have asked about the cross play function with the Vita and tablets. Can you give a little more information about that, clarify what access you have, how it will work?
Matt Levitan: I’m not sure what it will be like on day one. I know the plan is that we will bring it to the market, and the short-term feature is that you will be able to jump in and play any game that you have digitally on the PS4 on your Vita via Wi-Fi. As far as I know, one day it might just be local. I am not sure what firmware update will bring that feature, it could be anywhere from two months to six months, but once we do launch that we will fulfill the promise of high level gaming on the go. Once you get to that level of interaction with your portable then there’s the really exciting promise of mobile gaming. We’re excited to bring that to the market. Technically speaking, it’s a huge accomplishment, but it’s something that I know that technically the PS4 is capable of doing, as is the Vita. It’s just a question of when, not if.
COG: Speaking of accessories, could you tell us a bit about the PlayStation Eye Camera?
Matt Levitan: Originally it was supposed to be in the box but we decided to take it out and keep it as a separate peripheral. We want to make sure that there is a really good gaming and social experience for it before we would ever make it mandatory for anyone to purchase. We want to give consumers a choice to say “yes, I want that now” or “no I don’t”, but I think that for the most part people will want it for video chat, but also down the road there’s going to be a lot of great picture in picture gaming stuff that we’re going to do and we’ll start to develop more and more games that will require it, but out of the gate there are not too many that need the camera functionality so we left it as an optional peripheral for the time being.
COG: Obviously there is comparison to Microsoft’s Kinect, how does the PlayStation Eye technology comparable to that?
Matt Levitan: I don’t really have a comparison as to how their camera performs against ours, but I know from a philosophy stand point it’s not a question of forcing certain genres into a type of camera gaming, but a question of complimenting games with an extra camera feature, as opposed to making a first person shooter into a camera game. If you have a first person shooter, we want the camera to add some value to the game. We’re not trying to rewrite the game; we just want to add a little something extra to the game.
COG: So for people getting the PS4 on Launch Day, what games should they get
Matt Levitan: There’s a pretty good variety of software, depending on what you like. I personally gravitate towards Killzone Shadowfall. I’ve always loved that franchise and I think the new one looks remarkably good. I also have small children in my house so I’ll be playing a lot of Skylanders and a lot of Knack. DriveClub looks great too. I love racing games when they’re easy, fun, and a pickup and play game. No disrespect to GT, it’s a great franchise, but I don’t have the time to earn every license or every car and I just want to jump in and race. If you like that kind of racing, you’re going to love DriveClub. It encourages you to start a clan with your buddies, choose your favourite car manufacturer, and just go out and race people.
COG: There is much focus on indie games on the PS4, why that choice?
Matt Levitan: It’s so important for us. You look at all the indie games that have come up in the past 5 years, games like Minecraft, Fez, and Bastion, all amazing stuff. Some of my favourite games this past generation were Journey, Unfinished Swan, and Flower, and these are games that are small dev companies, where anywhere from one person to small groups of 5-10 people are involved, and they are making games for half a million or one million bucks, not the $20 – $50 million dollar productions. But there is great ingenuity there, and a lot of times they have a hard time bringing their product to market because they don’t have the marketing plans, they have a hard time publishing, and they don’t want to get into a publishing deal with a big third party publishing and lose their IP rights.
If you look at the way we’ve embraced it, we want to make PSN to be a very vibrant community for these games. We want them to come work with us, we’ll help market it, they publish and keep all the publishing rights, own their IP, and at the same time they can sell it for $10 or $15, they choose what to sell it for as opposed to iOS and Android where they are forced to sell for $1 or $2 just to try gain steam. But then it’s hard to make money when selling a game for .99 cents, so a lot of developers have said to us they like PSN for that reason, the end up taking some real revenue home, as opposed to other formats.
COG: PSN and PS Plus go hand in hand. Any major changes happening to that subscription format?
Matt Levitan: No. For the same $50 that you’re spending now you’ll have added PS4 to it. So if you have PS Plus for PS3 and Vita, for the same amount of money you’ll get great content for the PS4, like DriveClub Prologue, in which you can try a number of cars and tracks. It won’t be the full version, but it will be a playable version. There are also three indies at launch that you’ll have an opportunity to play. If you were to look at the first year of Plus, all the great games you were able to enjoy for $50, you definitely got your monies worth. It’s not a gate that you have to pay to access Netflix, or features like that. It’s a subscription format that gives you great content. That was always our goal, and I think we’ve established that.
We would like to thank Matt for spending some time to answer a few questions during the madness that is known as Fan Expo Canada.
