Mark Rein: (Grins) That’s right. That’s why we’re on PlayStation 3 first, because of the mods.
SPOnG: Are we seeing a shift to a new genre of game, where user-generated content is mainly ‘the game’?
Mark Rein: It’s hard to say. We don’t like to pretend that we know what consumers are going to do or how they’ll behave. The big thing there is when there are mods that break down the barriers of what the game does, the big thing for us is to get the news out. Or maybe the community will tell us the news itself. What we’re doing is we’re enabling it. We’re giving you the ability to create your mods on PC and bring them over to PS3, or download them off the Internet and stick them on your PS3.
We don’t know yet and we can’t even imagine what the community is going to do with this. It’s hard to say what will emerge from it, but we are certainly putting all the pieces in place. The one great thing about our ‘user-generated content’, that fancy term these days that everybody is using, is that it is REAL user-generated content. We’re not just re-arranging the deckchairs on the boat, like other games with in-game editors are doing. We’re letting you make a whole new boat; or a plane, or a car, or a submarine, or a dragon… however the hell you wanna move around, we’re giving you all the capabilities of the editor. Pretty much everything you can do with it on the PC you can bring over to the PS3. So (it’s) not just changing maps and moving things around changing weapons, you can create new weapons and new vehicles and new cinematics… I mean, pretty much anything you can do on the PC you can do on PS3.
When Sony originally said, “Ours is an open network” we said, “Oh yeah? Well, we’ll see how open you really willing to be…”
To their credit, they have been fully supportive of this. I mean, Jack Tretton (CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America) got up on stage and said “We’re using user-created mods”.
I mean, we can’t wait to see what happens. There’s no question that this kind of modding ability has never happened on console before.
SPOnG: So, what about the Xbox 360 version?
Mark Rein: Well, we’re going to do it on 360 – the thing we don’t know and don’t have the time to figure out right now is how we are going to handle mods. On the PS3, it’s an open network, you have a web browser, you can go and browse whatever content you want. You want to stick your movie on the machine? You can.
Xbox 360, in terms of talking to the Internet, is a closed network. So how do we get the mods out there? There’s no way right now to take a level and to stick it on your machine – so that’s something that we have to sit down with Microsoft and have a dialogue about that to figure out “How can we do this? Are you willing to let us do that?” and so on.
Microsoft is very willing to talk to us on this. There’s no problem here. They have a busy Christmas with a lot of great titles coming out. We’re just too busy ourselves right now to worry about this. We knew PS3 was open and we could do what we wanted to start… So, we’re going to sit down with them next year and figure out how we are going to do it.
Worst case scenario? We will bring the mods to Xbox LIVE. If Microsoft, for one reason or another, can’t get their heads around the idea of having mods then we’ll build some sort of mod architecture and we’ll put the best mods through (Microsoft) certification and we’ll offer them on Xbox LIVE. That’s not an ideal situation. That would certainly limit what we were able to do and that would funnel the number of mods that would be made available to a very small amount. But that’s the worst-case scenario.
We’ll see. I mean, Microsoft is not ‘against’ user-generated content. They just want to keep their closed system safe and secure and, more accurately, they want to make sure that the content has been checked, professionally. Sony’s willing to take a few more bets.