At approximately the half-way point, Croal said that the jazz portion of their session had ended, and it was now time for the blues. Croal pointed out that Harrison was in charge of third-party relations, and that according to multiple developers, Microsoft's external developer support was clearly better when compared to Sony's. He went on to state that stateside developers even received documentation in Japanese.
Harrison responded by stating that when comments such as those are made, there's clearly some truth to them. Sony could always do a better job, and provide better tools. It was, however, a myth that Sony provided documentation in Japanese, although the company has done that in the past. In fact, in his earlier days with the company, one of his duties was working on the translation from Japanese to English. He would take those comments on board, or course, but with 47 titles released for the PlayStation 3, Harrison contended that developers have and can continue to release software to the platform.
MotorStorm on PS3.
Harrison was then presented with the common developer perspective that Sony platforms are generally more powerful than those of the competition, but developing for them is a 'pain in the ass.' From Harrison's perspective, it was a catch-22 situation, as with greater access comes a more difficult development process. Finding a happy balance was key, and Sony didn't want to be in a situation like with the original PlayStation where you needed a special voodoo to write for the platform. Croal asked whether these complaints stemmed from the asynchronous nature of the Cell's architecture. Clearly reinterpreting a perceived weakness into a strength, Harrison stated that the programmers that do the best work with a platform are those that try to get the most out of the architecture.
The next topic was the launch of the PlayStation 3, and Ken Kutaragi's bold announcement that it would truly be a worldwide launch. Yet some developers contended that Japanese firms got early access to the PS3 dev kids, and Electronic Arts got a head start with dev kits made available to them before they shipped to everyone else. Harrison joked that one approach he considered was stacking the dev kits outside in the parking lot like the infamous Wal-Mart assistant manager, and telling the developers to "Go!" In a more serious response, he stated that the claims were unfounded, as the first Cell-based PS3 dev kits were actually first available in the US, and an attendee representing Electronic Arts denied the claim that they had early access to the kits.
Regarding the PlayStation 3's online services at launch, Croal equated the Sony system to a 'roll your own approach,' as opposed to the extensive services made available by Microsoft's Xbox Live. Harrison assured the audience that Sony has an aggressive strategy to implement additional features to the PlayStation Network, and pointed to the history of the PSP as an example of how their services evolve over the life of a platform, while still remaining free of charge. When asked whether the speculation that similar services to those available on Xbox Live were not feasible for the PlayStation Network due to the lack of a service charge, Harrison denied the claim, offering up that revenue is now coming from different sources, and that exciting announcements regarding these revenue streams would be forthcoming, although he could obviously not state any specifics.
Comparisons to Xbox Live kept coming, and Harrison was asked what Sony's timetable was for providing an experience that matched Microsoft's. Harrison contended that in many ways, they already have, citing Resistance: Fall of Man's 40-player online multiplayer at launch as an amazing achievement. He also mentioned that 12-player MotorStorm has been described as more fun than humans should be able to have with their clothes on."
