Mark Cerny: For the PS4’s First Year, “The Focus is on Core Gamers”

Aside from recording Bad Gamers, sleeping, touching Cerny’s big controller, and whatever else Sebastian gets up to during the weekend, he’s been spending a lot of time typing out the interviews he recorded while at PlayFest last week, including one with Mark Cerny.

You’ll still have to wait a little bit longer for the Sebastian/Cerny Face/Off, but Cerny also talked to CVG, where he was asked if he thinks that the PS4 is innovative enough:

The hardware is an enabler. We are very intentionally trying to make the hardware easy to learn and difficult to master. When you think about innovation, I think that is going to be satisfied by the larger user experience that surrounds the games.

I’m talking about a true friends’ network, the ability to download as you play, the ability to see what your friends are doing in real-time, sharing screenshots and videos. The experience is that, when you play a game, you feel like you’re on an adventure with your real-world friends.

Obviously, Sony’s goal is to have the PlayStation 4 in the hands of as many people as humanly possible, with Cerny looking at the industry as “there are a billion who like playing games. I mean, everyone with a smartphone plays smartphone games, right? So the question is, where do the console fit in this bigger world?”

Cerny then answered his own question:

So, certainly on year one, the focus is on core gamers. But I wanted to make sure there was a game in there that the rest of the family could enjoy. My intention is that Knack will be people’s second purchase when they go to the game stores. Get Watch Dogs all for yourself, but get Knack for the rest of the family.

When we start welcoming the kinds of experiences that those billion people enjoy, then the future of console gaming gets very bright indeed.

We don’t know all of the 140 games in development for the PlayStation 4 (we can guess some of them though), but expect a focus on the core gamer.

How many PS4 games do you think you’ll buy in the first year? Let us know in the comments below.

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