Sony’s Director of Product Development for its Santa Monica Studios, John Hight, recently spoke to MTV on a number of issues regarding the company’s popular online download and multiplayer service, the PlayStation Network.
Hight described how the company has remained carefully selective when deciding on content for the PSN, delivering a unique experience in titles such as Everyday Shooter and Flow; as opposed to simply bombarding it’s users with dozens of titles, which may only enjoy limited appeal.
“We’re very careful about the stuff we add to our catalog”, said Hight, during a phone interview with MTV’s Multiplayer blog.
“Early on as a company we decided it’s not going to be about giant numbers and ‘Hey, come to PlayStation Network and you’ll have 5000 games, maybe three of which you actually want. Go ahead and find that needle in the haystack.’ It’s more about each one of these experiences is something special.”
High also offered some insight as to why the company hasn’t adopted Microsoft’s offer of a free demo for every full release, ala Xbox Live Arcade, adding, “That’s a hotly debated thing. We did a demo on ‘Blast Factor‘ and I’ve got 600,000 people playing that demo but I haven’t translated that into 600,000 people buying the game.”
“… I think the demo kind of hurt it in a way and people got satiated. They made a presumption that, ‘oh, ok, the whole game is going to be like this.’ It wasn’t true. The game actually has a lot of depth in each one of the levels.”
“We didn’t actually do a demo for ‘flOw.’ We did a movie. And it was a very conscious decision. Because we were kind of spooked with what we saw with ‘Blast Factor.’ We thought, wow, we don’t want people to just give up on it.”
“So if I artificially put a clock on it, is that time period right experience for you? Or for the average person? I don’t know. So we felt, nah, let’s not do it. Let’s try to tell people that this is a different experience and show them really great graphics and great music and hopefully we’ll just win them over on execution and if they buy the game then they’ll be satisfied with the experience itself. Because it’s really a subtle experience and I’m not sure a few minutes with a demo would do it justice.”