About the Rev:
Moving onto Nintendo and its plans for the Revolution - what do you make of its approach? Is it a system you'd look to develop for?
Mark Rein: We're definitely interested in it and we're looking forward to seeing the specifications and where it sits in terms of graphical capability. We're interested in looking at it, we've spoken to Nintendo and expressed our interest.
About PS3 HUB:
I don't think Sony necessarily has to replicate Xbox Live to be successful in online games. What they really need is some quite simple and rudimentary features to start with. They need server-browser capability. Unreal Tournament has had server-brower capabilities built in for years and years. If Sony never delivered any online components to us, we'd just use our own. It isn't rocket science, we're already doing it. What you do need is inter-game communication and that's what's great about Xbox, the ability to say "come join my game". It needs a friends service, maybe some sort of scoreboard facilities - but that's not essential, developers can create their own on the web.
With an open system you can take the user out to your web page and your scoreboards. It needs voice-over-IP which I think Sony's already talked about in their E3 presentation, with a video camera and headsets and things like that. I think everybody's expectation that they've got to build a big massive Xbox Live competitor to be successful... I don't think that's accurate, I think they just need a few components, which you can go out and buy from companies today anyway.
I'm not the slightest bit worried about how Sony will fare in online, they'll do just fine and they can take a couple of important baby steps and mandate a couple of technical requirements, that's what platform holders do. Then they can gradually update it over time. In a more open platform, it's very easy for them to put a browser-like scenario in the machine and send people off to the servers or services. They're more than capable of doing all that. For Sony, it's about services, not necessarily a service.
About X360 and the launch:
The next-gen's arrived now with Xbox 360. What kind of impact do you think that's made and how do you think Microsoft's launch has gone?
Mark Rein: I think the Xbox 360 launch has been extremely successful. Yeah they've struggled with getting the quantity of units out there and I think you could certainly have a much worse problem than that. But I think the quality of the launch titles was very good, probably the best I've seen of a launch console and I think the device is very good. I think they really nailed what they needed to have for this time frame and this generation.
As we've said in the past, the 360 turned out to be more powerful than our original estimates were, based on specifications and that's always a positive thing. The developers seem to be taking to it like crazy. You know, we talk to a lot of developers and the uptake of 360 is extremely high amongst developers. There's more excitement than I've seen in the past, for example, with Xbox one. So that's really good news.
I think there's a very bright future ahead. Obviously we know what some of the second generation Xbox titles look like and they're really what users are expecting - or I should say, what users are hoping they'll see from Xbox 360. Those titles are coming and I think that's going to be extremely impressive.
