Phil Harrison talks PS3

I think that some of the research that we've done, clearly other companies have been doing as well - so there's nothing completely surprising about that. But I know that the strategy was to take what was already a winning formula - to have a controller as well regarded as it, and kind of the de facto industry standard that this PlayStation shape controller has become. If you include the ones that are packed in, the secondary ones and the knock-offs that are the same shape, there are probably around 400 million of these things that have been sold on PSone and PS2.

So, we kind of took an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" strategy - but by adding motion sensitivity to the controller... Well, we didn't start the wave, but we've kind of jumped onto that wave. I'm quite happy to admit that, but that will be one of the defining characteristics of next-generation gaming, the complexity and sophistication of input that you can get from a very simple device.

What I'm really keen to communicate is the fact that by sticking with the PlayStation controller, you have this very comfortable, two-handed approach that gamers are very familiar with - and it allows you to have two channels of input. You've got your primary input that may be normal buttons, normal sticks, nothing particularly revolutionary - no pun intended - but we can also add secondary motion, and we can detect the secondary movement of the pad in addition to the primary buttons.

When you play games, everybody does the same thing - they always move the controller around. Well, we can now start to add that secondary motion into the game design, and the way that the game reacts to the user.

I think you're right, but I don't think that was actually the plan. I think that that is the outcome - you want to make the games and the experiences that you offer on your platform as unique and as defendable as you possibly can, and obviously that innovation is one of them.

That said, I think that with some exceptions, first party will probably be the majority of the exclusives on PlayStation 3. It's just the reality of the world that we live in - and it was very kind of Microsoft to announce one of those [multi-platform titles] for us.

Happy, but not satisfied. We can always do better, we can always have more - but I think we've shown enough breadth and we've shown enough quality, and we've shown a direction of where we're going to end up at launch. We're six months away from launch, remember, and there are some very polished games on our stand, which I don't think you've ever seen from another platform launch. That includes our own - PSone and PS2 - this far out from launch.

Am I concerned... Well, I wouldn't say concerned, but I'm certainly conscious of that. I think that we will have games that are really compelling and are really going to deliver on the promise, but I don't think it'll be an issue.

I think the PlayStation 2 was a difficult machine to write for, especially to really maximise what it was capable of on the vector units, VU0 and VU1, the proprietary SIMD engines, because they used fairly low-level programming techniques to program for them. However, that didn't stop us selling a hundred and something million, and having a billion plus software units sold for the machine, and global average of 77 per cent plus market share.

On PlayStation 3, however, the Cell SPUs are programmed with high-level programming languages, and that allows us to get great performance with general-purpose programming techniques. So, the short answer is, it's much, much easier to program for. Witness the fact that we've got so much software up and running, and playable, this far out from launch.