Sebastian and Dan’s Daily Reaction yesterday was all about trolling in the industry, and made reference to Andrew House’s remarks during the PlayStation gamescom Press Conference where he talked about how other companies “have shifted their message and changed their story.”
In an interview with The Guardian following the event, Andrew House, President of Sony Computer Entertainment, discussed why he made that remark in such a public manner:
It all goes back to that initial Xbox One proposition, unveiled at the Microsoft campus back in May – that the console would be a digital-media machine, that everything was shifting, that game discs were all but obsolete. The whole thing has been warped and misrepresented since, but the message coming from Redmond was that gamers would have to get used to a new way of purchasing and playing games.
Saying how they “tend to stay away from over analyzing what the competition is up to,” Andrew continued:
But I’ll characterize it this way: I was surprised… we constructed our E3 presentation because there was somehow a suspicion that the policies and approaches taken by our competition would create an industry trend in that direction. The reason we made such a strong statement at E3, and continue to do so, is because we were surprised by that.
We thought perhaps slightly naively that the current model worked quite well and was consumer friendly, and our goal was to be consistent on that. But given the speculation that was happening there, it apparently became necessary for us to make a statement and say what our intent was.
With the PlayStation 4 launching on November 15th/29th and the Xbox One expected to launch in November, it’s going to be a good fight between the two systems, something House sees as a positive:
At the risk of sounding over-optimistic, I think there is a huge benefit for the industry overall in having two platforms launch very close together. It creates a large focus on our form of entertainment that wouldn’t exist unless there were these two powerful organisations, both playing in the same space.
I think it’s already happening in that there’s so much strong interest, so much excitement and demand. I mean, over a million pre-orders for PS4 at this stage before launch I think says something very powerful. Competition is a good thing for this industry, offering choice is a good thing. These are all positives.
Do you like the having two major systems launch so closely together? Do you think the PS4 and Xbox One will release as close together as the Wii and PS3 did? Let us know in the comments below.
