Phil Harrison, executive vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, has warned consumers that it is "dangerous" to make assumptions on the performance of videogames consoles based solely on their launch line-up.
During an interview with Game Informer magazine, Harrison dismissed criticism suggesting that PlayStation 3 launch titles failed to showcase the systems technological advancements, illustrating Resistance: Fall of Man, Formula 1 and MotorStorm as key titles in its line-up.
"Now, it’s always dangerous to judge any system by its launch line-up… You only have to go back to the games that launched PlayStation 1 and Playstation 2," explained Harrison. "If you took those few dozen titles and analysed them, you would never have imagined that either of those formats would have on to sell over 100 million units each."
Furthermore, on his stance with platform exclusives, Harrison was keen to point out that he is "always concerned to make sure that consumers can buy the best games and get the best game experiences to validate their system purchase". Even so, Harrison feels that consumers are ultimately indiscriminate on whether exclusive titles are first or third party games, as long as the quality remains consistent.
"[Consumers] don’t care if they are third-party or first-party…”, observed Harrison. “What I do believe is that the investments we have made in Worldwide Studios globally – US, Europe, and Japan – will yield the best quality software and the highest quality experiences that are clearly going to be exclusive to the platform.”
Harrison also touched on the firm’s upcoming Home online service, forecasting a release some time in October of this year. He said that beta progress is proving more than satisfactory. Lastly, while dodging accusations that sales of PlayStation Portable software have been somewhat poor as of late, he did concede that the firm could do more to take advantage of the system’s multimedia and gaming capabilities.