 Hi, this is Brian Crescenti from Vox Games speaking to you from Sony headquarters in New York. And I'm here with Jack Trenton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America. Jack, nice to see you again. Brian, great to see you too. So tonight you will be, you're staying up I guess, you just flew in from the West Coast, but you're staying up for the launch of the Vita here in North America. Yeah, the morning came a little hard, but by midnight I should be cooking. And if you can't be excited about a platform launch, you shouldn't be in the business. I'm thrilled that this will be my fourth platform launch with Sony and very, very excited about Vita. Now this launch is, I know this is the full launch, but you've already had I guess a little taste of the launch with an earlier version that came out, or a bundle that came out a little earlier this month. Have you gotten any sort of numbers or do you have any sense on how that went? Yeah, it's the first time we've ever done that. We had a presale bundle available that gave consumers an opportunity to get it in their hands a week early, so they picked it up on the 15th. And we did see some initial reads, and clearly we're dealing with the most hardcore of the core, but I was really pleased to see not only the number of games it sold, but the depth of games. And then also great peripheral attach, a lot of people going out there and buying a lot of different accessories for Vita as well. Is there a particular game that's doing really well where people going out sort of buying specific games for that when they got the bundle, or have you not seen that yet? No question about that, and really not a surprise there. Uncharted Golden Abyss I think is the ultimate launch game and really a testament to what the Vita can do. So Nier is I think a neat idea, the idea of sort of being able to pick up or drop off like presents to your friends through this sort of online network. I'm a little confused in how I'm going to use it in the long term. Like I'm still, it's one of the newer things I guess that I experienced when I started playing around with the Vita. So how do you use it and like what kind of future do you think Nier has for the Vita and maybe for other PlayStation products on the line? Well I think consumers in general and people, you take comfort in people that are living the same life that you are. So if you're traveling all the time, you realize that you're not the only one living out of a suitcase spending a lot of time in airports. If you're a gamer, you're real social, you want to share your experiences, you want to talk about your experiences with your friends. The great thing about Nier is I hit that button and I'm able to see an incredible amount of people that are gaming locally and find out what they're playing, what they like, make new friends that way and it's done via GPS. So if I'm here in New York, I live in San Francisco, all of a sudden I'm exposed to all these people that are gaming in Manhattan with the touch of a button. And it's amazing how much you have in common with the people that are out there gaming, not only the games you're playing but the type of games that you're interested in as well. One of the other things I noticed, I think everybody's going to notice obviously, is the live area, which is sort of the interface that you guys have. We don't have the cross media bar anymore. What was the reasoning behind that? Do you think that live area is going to be sort of the future of the user interface for PlayStation products? Well, I think in general terms, we've really focused on the user experience and to try to make that as seamless as possible, to make it as easy to use. And that's just something I noticed about the Vita initially, not only the game controls but the ability to toggle in and out of apps and get from point A to point B very easily and connect with other gamers. So is it an experience you think that's specifically designed for the portable market or could we see this either coming to the PlayStation 3 or to a future hardware that's sitting at home? Well, I think PlayStation has really been a bellwether among the Sony family in terms of connected digital devices. And of course, the goal is to have all Sony digital devices connected in a format that people are very comfortable with and connect various devices at the same time, not only within the Sony universe but outside it as well. So I really see it as a potential sign of things to come on other Sony devices. This is maybe a little too nitty gritty, but the PS3, does it have the ability to have that sort of massive change go live? Would you, for instance, do an update or a patch for the PS3 that would completely change the interface to something like what the Vita has? I don't know that you're going to see something that's identical to the Vita day one, but I think if you look back on the history of the PlayStation 3, that interface has improved on a regular basis and has evolved. That being said, people have worked with it since 2006 and it kind of has its own look to it. And Vita certainly works in concert with that. But I don't think you're going to see Vita 2.0 on the PlayStation 3 in the near future. You will see a lot of the features influence each other though. So the cross media bar you think? I think the cross media bar is here to stay in PlayStation 3 for the foreseeable future. So the Vita, we were talking a little bit earlier about how you might use the Vita. One of the things I think is really interesting is that the Vita seems from a design perspective to be a device that wasn't created with the idea of the form factor first. So it doesn't feel like Sony sat down and said, OK, this needs to fit in a pocket and then we're going to figure out all the things we can put on it. It kind of feels like Sony wanted to design something that was a good gaming device and then worry later about the form factor. Is that right? I mean, was this about designing something that was a certain size or was it more about the experience? There's been a real focus across Sony for a number of years and I think Vita is one of the perfect examples of focusing on the user experience and putting tools in the hands of the people that would create that user experience. I think historically we would create a great engineering technology and we would hand it off to software development teams and say, here, see what you can do with this. And then they'd try to create the best gaming experience and we'd turn to consumers and say, what do you think of this? I think we did it in reverse order this time. We said to consumers, what would you ideally like to see in a device? We said to the software development community, what tools do you need to create the best possible games and user experiences? And then ultimately we designed a device around it. So I think we did it ideally from the user's perspective out as opposed to the designer's perspective in. I think in designing something like this, there's always this risk when you're doing something innovative that instead of making something innovative, you perhaps create something that's avant-garde in the sense that someone will see the device as interesting and different but over time might lose interest in it. So it becomes not something that can kind of jump that hurdle and become mainstream. The Japanese sales have sort of been dropping a little bit. Are you guys worried about that or do you think that there's going to be a mainstream appeal to this device? I think we've had a better focus around the design of any device that we've been involved in and make no mistake, this was designed by gamers for gamers. And if you're a gamer, you will get it immediately when you hold it in your hand and you will see that we've created tools to create the ultimate games for gamers. If you're not a gamer, then you may not be able to get it day one and will eventually ideally get to you. But we didn't design it for the casual consumer that dabbles with gaming. We designed it for the hardcore gamer and we think we can reach out to the casual audience but clearly we designed it with the core gamer in mind. Would you say that this is going after the PlayStation 3 audience or do you think it's more the hardcore gamer, like that broader Xbox, Wii, PS3 audience, PC? The center of the bull's eye is the PS3 owner, male, 20-something and I think the second concentric circle out from that is just core gamer in general. But I think the advantage of having a PlayStation 3 consumer as being the center of the target is they've already got their trophies, they've already got their friends, they've already got their online ID, they've got the PlayStation 3 experience and they're going to appreciate the cloud saves and picking up a game that they had just paused on PlayStation 3 and taking it with them on the Vita. Going after the PS3 market, you sort of outlined some of the things just now that would make that a little easier. You don't have to essentially reeducate some gamers but are you guys already starting to think about how do we appeal to someone who, for instance, owns an Xbox 360 and wants to have that full sort of core gaming experience on the go? You don't have that appeal built in of being able to say you can go from your Xbox to your Vita obviously. So is there some way that you guys might sort of try to tackle that? First and foremost, we're targeting gamers and the good news is there's more gamers than there's ever been before. Supposedly there's a billion consumers worldwide that consider themselves gamers. 163 million in the United States and those of us who have been gaming for a long time know that that was a much smaller audience back in the day and now everybody considers themselves somewhat of a gamer and I think that's good. That ultimately gets people to appreciate that this is mainstream entertainment and for those of us who are dedicated to the gaming industry, it says you picked the right business to be in, it's bigger than it's ever been. So you mentioned iPhone and tablet gamers earlier. You talked about sort of I guess everybody sees those people, people who game just that way or primarily that way as sort of the biggest, broadest audience. Is there a way do you think to attract someone who's used to spending less than a dollar on a game to a system that granted has less expensive games but doesn't have dollar games and really it seems to live in the 40 to 50 or 30 to 40 dollar range? I think there's a great opportunity because just gaming in general intimidated a lot of people. I mean just buttons and control and how do I make that work and why would I want to play a game and I think if you looked five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, you'd find the majority of people didn't consider themselves gamers and may have never played a game. Nowadays, you know, just about everybody that you're going to encounter is either playing currently or has played at some point in their lives so it's less intimidating than it's been before. So once you demystify gaming and you understand that it's not so hard to control characters and you realize the interactive and immersive nature of gaming, as I said, I think as it starts to hook you, you find yourself wanting more and more. You want more depth to the game and you want more control of the characters and that's where I feel we can really migrate people up the food chain. And the great thing with a device like a PlayStation Vita, it doesn't have to be the $50 uncharted experience. It can be 99 cent PlayStation minis which I think compare very favorably to games that are available on smartphones. So that entire ecosystem is available on the Vita but it's not limited to those small form experiences. You do have the opportunity to play, you know, the full form games like an uncharted. It's interesting because, again, we were talking about this earlier but the idea of, I think over the years with the introduction of smartphones like the iPhone and Android phones, you've had this rise in devices that get people to make decisions in terms of what they're willing to accept because of the convenience. So the convenience of having something in your pocket that you have to have there because it's a phone but then we're starting to sort of see this turn now where people are going out and I'm one of those people. I went out and I bought a Kindle. I can read Kindle books on my iPhone but I went out and bought a Kindle because I like that. I like that it was designed and developed for a book. So do you think that you can sort of convince people like Amazon has convinced people with the Kindle that they need to go out and buy a device that's made just to game and won't do other things? Well, you just hit the nail on the head and you probably know it better than anybody. If you're a gamer, then you're going to gravitate towards a dedicated gaming device. Everything has a core competency and you said it yourself. If it's a smartphone, it's a smartphone that can also game and if gaming is number four or number five on your priority list for what you want that device to do, that might be good enough for you. But if you're a gamer, you're going to be drawn to something that's going to give you the ultimate gaming experience. Do you have any way of tracking or have you tried to sort of look at those people who are the Angry Birds game players or hidden object game players or the two minutes every three or four hour game players and seeing if they have the interest in sort of making that jump over from being super casual gamers to being what I guess we call now hardcore gamers? Well, I think there's more interest than there's ever been before. I think back to the launch of PSP in 2005 and that was a dedicated gaming device targeted towards gamers. But the thought of getting a housewife or a businessman onto the PSP was much more daunting to me than it is today. If some mom is sitting there playing words with friends or playing Angry Birds and she sees a Vita where she wouldn't even notice it before, you find them looking over to it going what the heck is that? Again, people have the ability to see the visual effects, they see the graphics, they see the depth of the game play and they're going to be drawn to it. So I think there's absolutely that potential just from being able to demystify it and have people holding a controller in their hand, whether it's a touch controller on a smartphone or whether it's a dedicated controller in a console than ever before. I know we're running out of time, I really want to talk to you though about the PSP. So obviously this isn't the first portable that you guys have launched. You have seven years I think experience with PlayStation Portable and you had the PSP come out, you had four iterations of that and then the PS Go came out. What do you think you learned from that? Because you mentioned several times the launch of the PSP and that came during a time when I think portable gaming wasn't, the expectation of portable gaming wasn't the same in many ways in two different directions. There wasn't the expectation that you could have this really light enjoyable experience or that you could have this really hardcore experience. So what do you think you've learned from the PSP and applied to the Vita? And also the Go I thought was a really, I love the PSP Go. I felt like it didn't get the consumer support it deserved. I was a big fan of it. So what did you guys take away from that experience in coming out with the Vita? Well tremendous lessons learned there. As I said earlier in the discussion when we came out with the PSP people saw a dedicated portable device, this is more casual, is more youth oriented. We ushered in the older consumer, the more console like experience and we very successfully sold over 75 million units in that seven year window that you referred to. Now with the PlayStation Vita we have promise of a lot of the things that we attempted to do with the original PlayStation Portable. We've got the technology and the horsepower to be used in conjunction with PS3 much more than we did back in the early days of PSP. We've got a true multimedia device that's really the expectation as opposed to an ideal expansion of the market as it was in 2005. But we've got the gaming and the user interface that we'd always hoped for, the dual analog sticks, the front and back touch, the dual cameras. So it's really the console gaming experience in the palm of your hand that we hope to bring to consumers and quite frankly I think we very proudly did based on 2005 technology. But as I said the gaming universe is bigger than it's ever been before. We've established the fact that portable gaming isn't just for casual, isn't just for youth, that it can be for the core gamer as well. And I think we're going to reap the benefits of that with the PlayStation Vita. And very last question I promise, I just wanted to get clarification because it seems like there's been a little confusion on the UMD Passport Program. It's coming to North America, not coming to North America? It's not coming to North America. I mean that was a program created in Japan for Japanese consumers and I think if you follow Sony and you follow PlayStation in particular you'll realize that the platforms are marketed very differently. They're at very different price points with different product offerings and I think we're proud of the product offerings we have for the consumers in the States but that's different from the product offerings and the way we market to consumers in Japan. So that was a Japan program that I believe worked really well for them but we feel we've got a good amount of offerings and a good value for consumers with the existing program that we have. All right, well thank you very much for taking the time and good luck tonight. I think it's going to be exciting. Thanks, I'm looking forward to it.