[This post is the third in a series that recounts the chain of questions and answers I solicited from the people I interviewed during E3. I asked each of my interviewees to ask a question of the next one. Hence: Chain Interview.]

In a hotel room suite on the Wednesday of E3 week, I asked the next chain interview question to Sony’s Peter Dille. He had just let me play Gran Turismo on his white PSPGo and answered a batch of questions about Sony’s E3 showing. Dille was happy to answer Schappert’s question, but admitted to having trouble doing so simply due to a lack of regular use of Xbox Live.

Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment of America responds: “I don’t spend a lot of time on it… Xbox Live has been out for a while and Microsoft’s done a really good job getting people involved in online gaming. And that’s good news for the industry.”

Dille surprised me, and I told him so. I thought he would have made a remark about Microsoft charging for online play, but he didn’t take the bait. Instead, he took the opportunity to keep the chain going for my next interview, located on floor below.

Peter Dille asks Sony Computer Entertainment vice president of product development Scott Rohde: “What advantages do you see in developing for PS3 compared to other platforms?”

Armed with that query, I headed over to Rohde’s room. We talked about Sony’s U.S. studios, whose efforts he oversees. He let me videotape his PSPgo’s sliding action. And then I lobbed him the softball.

Scott Rohde responds “What developers have discovered over the past three years — you’ve heard [Sony Computer Entertainment president] Kaz [Hirai] make reference to this in other interviews — it’s kind of the machine that just keeps giving. As you peel off new layers of the onion, you kind of find out more capabilities that the machine can do. When people start taking advantage of the [PS3's seven] SPUs and the Cell [processor[ they really find that, wow, we can throw more and more tasks and processes at those SPUs and we have all this freedom on the main processor to do more."

I pointed out to Rohde that Dille was asking for a comparison to other platform. His answer implied that the same kinds of things couldn't be said about the other major consoles. Fair? "Absolutely," he replied.
My next interview later in the day would be with Microsoft's corporate vice president of strategy and business development for the company's interactive entertainment division. That'd be Shane Kim, former head of first-party game development for the Xbox 360. This would be Sony's chance to turn things back on Microsoft and keep the chain connected. Question, please?

Rohde prefaced his question by noting that I always ask him about sports games, largely because Rohde used to run Sony's San Diego studio which produces the PlayStation's basketball and basebell games.

Scott Rohde asks Shane Kim: "[Stephen] identifies me as a sports guy and, at heart I, am. I would love to know if Microsoft has any thoughts about getting back into first-party sports development.”

Shane Kim’s answer, and more links in the chain – including the most awkward question of the week – will run here tomorrow.

[This post is the second in a series that recounts the chain of questions I solicited from the people I interviewed during E3. I asked each of my interviewees to ask a question of the next one. Hence: Chain Interview.]

Yoshio Sakamoto, longtime designer of many Metroid games responds: “I want him to be there forever. [pause] That’s quite a question!”

Sakamoto gave me this answer over much laughter. But Miyamoto had it easy, asking a question of one of his co-workers. Sakamoto had a tougher challenge. I explained that I was next going to interview Xbox Live software and services corporate vice president John Schappert (aka the guy who delivered most of Microsoft’s E3 press briefing.) I needed a question. Sakamoto, through his translator, obliged.

Yoshio Sakamoto asks Microsoft corporate vice president of Xbox Live software and services John Schappert: “Do you like Metroid?”

And he can’t resist throwing in a second question: Do you like Mr. Miyamoto?

Later in the day, in a meeting room on the second floor of Microsoft’s always-gleaming, always-white E3 Xbox 360 booth, Schappert reached the finish line of my interview with him when I sprang Sakamoto’s two questions.

John Schappert responds: “I do like Metroid. And I think Nintendo has made absolutely amazing games. I grew up playing Nintendo. I grew up as a Nintendo SNES programmer… the Metroid on the SNES was phenomenal.”

Note that Schappert founded Madden development studio Tiburon and had been making games for multiple hardware generations. The SNES was not an alien object to him. And to the second question about Miyamoto?

“He’s my hero. And I proudly have an original Mario drawing that he made for me in my office. He is my inspiration in the industry. I think he crafts some amazing experiences and I think that he is an icon for us all to look up to.”

Schappert was my final interview of the day. I’d start the next day with a Sony interview. I needed a Schappert question for it.

John Schappert asks Sony Computer Entertainment of America senior vice president of marketing Peter Dille: “What do you think of Xbox Live?”

Peter Dille’s answer will run tomorrow, along with two more links to the chain.

We covered Microsoft’s new motion-control system, Natal, heavily last week. And that’s without us getting a firm release date for it.

But what of Sony’s camera-and-wand PS3 tech, also debuting at E3 2009, and which is dated for a spring 2010 release?

During my interview with Sony Computer Entertainment of America marketing chief Peter Dille, I pressed for more details.

The Sony approach involved a showcase of a player holding one or two wand-shaped controllers in his hand. A PlayStation camera detected some of the positional information of the controller. Holding the controller allowed the player to precisely write words on a virtual canvas and to tightly control a bow-and-arrow or a gun in shooting demos. The PS3 was also able to render the wand as a virtual object, even when showing a video feed of the person holding the wand (that wand appearing as a giant gold gun or a tennis racket, in the demos).

First, I asked Dille, did I miss a name for this thing?

“You didn’t miss it,” Dille said. “There is none yet. We were careful to say that Rick Marks is the engineer. We’re announcing the technology, not the product or game. He also wanted people to know the form factor of the wand is a prototype. I think it is representative of what the product will include. In other words, it will have buttons. It will have the ability to have a trigger if you’re having that style of game. The button in the archery demo was key to how far you’re pulling [the wand] back. And the light is detecting that. So the other key is the light on the tip of the wand. So no product name, no pricing, no specifics on the product aspect.”

What Dille did confirm is that the camera used in the demo was a regular PlayStation Eye camera.

Microsoft’s Natal showing suggested that motion-control’s future might not involve a controller. Dille, however, thinks that having a controller in your hand even for motion-control is important, especially given the new target market he thinks Sony can hit with their device:

“It’s not only relevant.” he said. “From our perspective we have the technology that provides better precision. And that gives us the opportunity to do the best of both worlds. If you want to do what we’re referring to as casual motion games, the PlayStation Eye and the motion controller do that quite nicely.

“The point that the demo was trying to articulate, I think, is that there’s a level of precision that the wand provides, whether it was in the handwriting demo that gets down to millimeters, that is going to allow game developers to create entirely new types of games that we believe have the potential to appeal to core gamers who, up until now, maybe haven’t embraced motion gaming as much as casual fans. So it’s a very robust technology that gives you the opportunity to do both.”

Despite being announced by Hideo Kojima at Monday’s Microsoft press conference, Peter Dille, Sony’s head of marketing for PlayStation in the U.S., told Kotaku today that the expected hit will also be available for his customers promptly. “Look forward to playing it on a PS3,” he said when we inquired if it was a Microsoft exclusive.

Asked if he expected that PS3 owners would be playing Metal Gear Solid Rising on the same day the game comes out on the Xbox 360, Dille said, “Yes, that’s correct.”

Dille used the question to draw what he sees as a distinction between Sony and its competitors. “I think the difference between our approach in our press conference and our competitors’ is that our focus is on exclusive content,” Dille said. “When a third party comes on our stage, it’s because they have something for our audience that is exclusive. And so whether it’s the Assassin’s Creed demo where Assassin’s Creed [2] might be cross platform, what we’re doing with the [weapon-unlocking] functionality between the PS3 and the PSP is a point of difference.”

Metal Gear has not abandoned you, Sony fans.

2008 was not a banner year for the PSP in North America, with a software release list that could nicely be called thin. That was in part due to developers nearly abandoning the platform.

Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America, tells Gamasutra that third-party publishers were “just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform,” some of which may be chalked up to massive amounts of PSP software piracy.

Dille says that “piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP” and that the company is pursuing both legal and educational efforts to decrease it.

“It’s not good for us, but it’s not good for the development community,” Dille tells Gamasutra. “We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it’s frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem.”

One of those changes may be a move to more digitally distributed titles, as games like echochrome and Patapon 2 go download only.

Sony: Piracy Has Taken ‘Big Chunk Of Game Sales’ From PSP [Gamasutra]

Sony’s Home has weathered its fair share of insults since launch. But putting arguments over the service’s usefulness aside for a moment, lets today look at some numbers.

Speaking with GameDaily, Sony’s Peter Dille has revealed a few user statistics for the service. Did you know, for example, that the average user spends 55 minutes in Home per session? Or that, since launch late last year, there have been four million “users” (which, in any online service where they don’t specify “active users” usually means the total number of registered accounts) in Home? You most certainly do now.

So what do those numbers mean for Sony? Bad news first: they either mean there are a lot of PS3 owners who don’t connect to the internet, or there are a lot of PS3 owners who simply don’t care about Home. Probably a good mix of both, because for a free service pitched as such an important part of the PlayStation Network, four million is a pretty low figure.

And the good news? Well, for those amongst the 4 million who still regularly use the service, an average of 55 minutes per session is surprisingly high. That’s a lot of time spent seeing Sony ads and, hopefully, building a Home “community”, even if it’s not breaking down how much of that time is spent loading spaces, playing games or simply wandering around and chatting/grinding.

Interview: Peter Dille Says Publishers are ‘Fired Up’ for PlayStation [GameDaily]

You may have heard, the PlayStation 3 is expensive. Not “private jet” expensive, sure, but compared to the Wii and 360, it’s expensive. So people want it cheaper. Sony, however, are having none of it.

Despite publishers, analysts and consumers calling repeatedly for a price cut on the machine, SCE America’s senior vice president of marketing Peter Dille sounds positively fed up with other people telling him how to do his job. “Everybody in the development community would love for the PS3 to be free”, Dille told Bloomberg, “so they could just sell razor blades”.

Why so huffy? It’s an understandable request. After all, razor blades are expensive!

Sony Faces Heat From Game Publishers to Cut PS3 Price [Bloomberg]

Welcome to the Family is a series of three letters that will run this week from the heads of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

Developers know they have to amortize that investment over a global marketplace and the best place to do that is on a PlayStation format. Because if you look at the global footprint, PlayStation 3 dominates in Japan where the 360 is really irrelevant. In Europe, the PlayStation 3 is already past the 360. And in the United States you have a dogfight…So back to the third-party community, they’re looking at what’s going on, they’re realigning their development resources to exploit PS3 and I think they understand that if they want to have a global return on their investment, PlayStation 3 is the only place they’re going to get it.

Man’s got a point, a point that – as the PS3 begins to slowly, inevitably pull away from the 360 in Europe – will only get sharper!

Sony: ‘Final Fantasy XIII’ Going To XBox 360 Creates ‘Jump Ball’ [MTV]

Consumers responded to “GTA” on the PS3 just as they did on the 360. And it becomes a bit of a jump ball. But it didn’t rise the tide for them. And I think if you fast forward to when “Final Fantasy XIII” comes out I think you’re going to have millions of people who grew up playing “Final Fantasy” on the PlayStation playing it on a PlayStation 3. They spent a lot of money, I’m sure, to get “Final Fantasy” onto the 360 but at the end of the day it’s on our platform as well. Which is why we focus on, “Let’s look at what happens when you have “Metal Gear Solid” on your platform … when the NPD numbers come out … I think you’ll see the value of what a real exclusive title does and how it raised the bar for PS3 versus 360.

So…exclusives don’t really matter, yet exclusives like MGS4 bring “value” and “raise the bar” for the PS3? You seem confused, Peter.

Sony: ‘Final Fantasy XIII’ Going To XBox 360 Creates ‘Jump Ball’ [MTV]