Hi everyone,
Some of you may know my name already - I'm Dan (aka Drexl), and the business and operational development of PlayStation Home for the SCEE region falls under my control.
TedTheDog, known to probably almost all of you, works in my team, and recently we've been chatting together about some of the feedback and opinion expressed within these forums about the status of Home in SCEE.
I’d like to directly respond to some of the comments and posts we have seen recently.
I want to make it clear that your views and opinions are VERY important to us, that we read them all, and I want to thank those of you who contribute positively, and who feed back constructively and intelligently, regardless of whether that feedback is positive or negative. As you rightly point out, community is integral to Home, its success, and its long-term future. We need you, rely on you, and appreciate you greatly.
However, some of the recent posts I have seen have been extremely negative, and on some occasions, inaccurate
I can understand some of your frustrations, and can assure you that myself and my team - not to mention the development studios who build Home, and my colleagues from other regions - are absolutely committed to the success of the platform. This evidently is not reflected in the current assessment of Home by the minority of you (and Home is still a beta service) and it is to those people specifically who I'd like to address my comments on this occasion.
Home content and deployment
Let me start by saying that the architecture behind Home is built for global implementation. There are four main regions that constitute the Home business – Europe, America, Japan and Asia (which covers Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan). We are all set up differently, and indeed we often all launch games at different times (and not at all, in some cases). To a degree, at present, Home mirrors the way our existing business is set up, but it’s a hugely complex platform, and we’re refining the way it operates. At the moment, yes, some regions have received content and spaces before SCEE, and I realize how frustrating this must be for you. However, we are working to improve our processes at a global level, and to increase the efficiency of our localisation and QA systems. In the near future, you will see a marked difference in how Home is populated with new content, games, and activities, and where possible we will be aiming for simultaneous releases of new spaces, items, mini-games etc. What we’re trying to with Home is a very ambitious undertaking, and we’re learning as we go along – it’s challenging, but also exciting. We do take into account your feedback, and it continues to help us shape this service in the direction we all want it to move, and I can assure you now that in the coming months you are going to see some very positive changes.
Regional complexities
It’s also worth remembering that SCEE is a very complex region, consisting of many different countries and languages. These aren’t excuses, they are just facts. PS Home is the first time we’ve tried to do something on this scale, and I’ve said before in various interviews that there will be a period of learning as we go along. We’re all in this together, and we all take it very seriously but we’re making improvements and refinements all the time. The needs of our customers are always paramount, and in a community-based service like Home, it can only benefit us to pull together with the community, not work against each other. My feeling – and it’s a feeling that I’m confident you’ll share once you see some of the changes I mention coming into effect – is that we are at an exciting turning point, and we’re in a position now where we can take all our learnings and channel them into delivering more of what you want, in a more timely and efficient fashion.
I can almost hear some of you now saying, “We’ve heard all this before” I’ve always tried to been very honest and open, and have always been passionate about making changes for the better in terms of how we manage this potentially fantastic service in the future. So, I’m making a commitment to you now – and I’m doing this with the blessing of my management team here at SCEE – that things are going to improve, and you are going to see that some of the initiatives we’ve all been working on coming to fruition.
As a final point, I’d like to put all this into some sort of context. Home is a FREE service to download and use. None of our competitors is doing anything like this, on this scale, and with this ambition. Also, we’re in Open Beta still. We’re in Open Beta precisely for the reasons I mention above – to learn, to refine, to evolve, and to work with the PS3 community to build Home into a platform we can all be proud of, and that we’ll want to visit every day. We see this as a very long-term ambition. We’re doing it because we believe in it, and because we want it to become an integral part of the experience you have on your PS3.
I’ve been about as honest and frank as I can be here, without divulging company-confidential information, and we want to ensure clearer channels of communication, so we can get the chance to have a frank and open dialogue more often with you as we move the platform forward.
As I said earlier, we totally welcome all feedback – we need it, we read all of it, and we thrive on it – but often, comments are based on a lack of understanding of the facts of a situation, so please don’t just flame us without thinking through some of the things I’ve said.
Thanks for reading – and once again, your continued support is greatly appreciated by ALL of us.
Dan
Edit: Link to Open Letter to SCEE
Message Edited by TedTheDog on 09-04-2009 12:14 PM
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