EXCLUSIVE: Jack Tretton talks rumble, Metal Gear, and Microsoft on Folding@Home (Page 3 of 3)

GP: How important is gaming 3.0, user-generated content and community experiences for the PS3, and is that the wave of the next generation?

JT: It all goes with having this very passionate relationship with the consumer and I think Phil's talked about it and I completely appreciate it. You work so hard to establish a relationship with the consumer whether it's to sell them a piece of hardware or software, but every time they walk out the door, that relationship typically gets severed unless you communicate with them through an online community. The ability to add expansion packs, to have the Home environment, or to have the user-generated content are ways to have every piece of software live and evolve until there's no longer consumer interest in it.

That's a really interesting thing we've seen on the PS2, for example with SOCOM, and there's still a very active SOCOM 2 online community, and those users engage each other and we engage with them, much more than an offline gaming experience that we know how many units have been sold, but we don't know how much the game is being played or what interest is left in it, and that's why you have to invest marketing dollars in focus groups and research like that.

When you have user-generated content and an active community, you're getting constant feedback and I think that's worth its weight in gold.

GP: Folding@Home has been a big success. There have been rumors that Microsoft wants to participate, too. Aside from any medical benefit that it might produce, would it be smart from a business standpoint for Microsoft to do join in considering the under-power of the Xbox 360 CPU compared to the PS3's Cell?

JT: I think what's very important to us, and I think is great for our consumers, is the pride that it gives you as a company to say that we're helping to fight and research Alzheimer's and that 250K people signed up in less than 60 days. And what we're doing takes 30 times longer on a PC, and that's a great testament to the PS3, but it's more a real feel-good thing to take your machine when it's idle to help contribute to that cause.

So if other companies can help contribute to that, I think that's great. But let's face it, if your motivation is for PR, to me, that's a little shallow. We go out of our way, correctly so, to make sure that we don't try to sell PS3s on Folding@Home. We try to look at it for just what it is, which is great community service for a great cause, and I think to look at it as a marketing platform is something that a company certainly wouldn't want to do. I'm certainly not insinuating that's Microsoft's motivation, but I'm not even sure how relevant it is to what were doing.

Would they be even having this conversation if we weren't doing it? I don't know. I would guess that the medical community would take help from anywhere they could get it, but the commentary that I heard is that Stanford isn't sure that [the Xbox 360's processing abilities] would help them very much, which is odd to be because if it helped at all, it seems like they would welcome it with open arms.

It's really ugly territory to get into, but let's take fighting a disease and see if we can get some credit for that. It's not a cool game to play one way or the other, so I don't want to even give the impression that that's our motivation and I'd be very disappointed if they're looking for PR value or to try to suck off some of the goodwill that we're doing.

GP: It seems Sony is focusing on creating new IPs and new game franchises? What's the underlying strategy?

JT: That's always been the case, and if heard my presentation earlier, I was talking about Nintendo and Sega had these great gaming heritages, and how we've been a great consumer electronics and hardware/technology company, but software is going to be very, very key. We invested heavily, and when companies like Microsoft said let's leave sports gaming to EA, we said no and that we have to be in it more than even because what's EA's motivation if they have no competition?

They have to build the best sports game on our platform if they have to compete with us. And so we've always believed that we have to set the bar for the third parties to basically keep them honest. Maybe that's not the right term and I certainly don't mean it that way, but if you can deliver good first-party content, then you're not a slave to third-party support. Then, it compliments what you do and doesn't define what you do, and that was very important to us.

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