Following up on last week’s interview with Satoru Iwata, today, Edge Magazine’s interview with Phil Harrison of Sony is published. Overall, while Sony showed some great games at E3, their exclusive press conference left a little to be desired. Harrison admits as much; when asked if there was a letdown after the previous year’s showing, he states, “Yeah, I agree with that, and I don’t quite know why that is. I guess, um, when something is new and exciting and heard for the first time, that elicits a certain reaction emotionally, compared to when you’re just confirming something that people already know.”

Certainly gamers would be glad to have the old Playstation-style controller back, but when your large controller innovation is “motion-sensing” which had already been announced by Nintendo, then this strongly gives the impression of someone that is a follower, and not an innovator. Add to that the fact that despite their justifications of the dual SKU market, it does appear that Sony went back on their word. Harrison’s explanation, that “he PlayStation 3 format is exactly the same between the two SKUs. Our competitor has a different format between the two SKUs - one with a hard drive, one without - but all PlayStation 3s have a hard drive” rings a little false when there are clearly differences between the hardware, and there is no upgrade path between on PS3 SKU to the other. On the Xbox 360, at least, if the gamer wants to add a hard drive later, this is possible, but to this day, there has been no announcement of a way for the lower priced PS3 SKU to get HDMI support; while this may not impact games at the beginning, the higher picture quality promised by HDMI 1.3 all but ensures a different experience between the two PS3 tiers.

The pricing of the PS3 on its own probably would have acted as a buzzkill, but combined with the apparent aping of its competitors and the backtracking of several promised from the 2005 E3, it is easy to see why the announcement was less successful.