Interview: Ray Maguire, MD of SCE UK

Maguire affects a studied unconcern: "For publishers, increasingly, the only way forward is to have multiple platform strategies. What's more important is the development cycle going forward. We have three platforms that vary in their technical ability. You can develop for the top-end, then dumb games down for the other platforms. What we will see in those titles is exclusivity in terms of functionality."

A fair point, but Sony clearly still needs to lobby third-party developers, as for the vast majority of cross-platform games, the lead development platform remains the Xbox 360.

Sony's first party games

Sony did have some first-party efforts, as Maguire points out, which were talked about for the first time at E3, notably the open-world superhero effort Infamous and the innovative-sounding Massive Action Game (MAG), a war-shooter in which you will play entirely against human opposition, which could be either something truly special or a recipe for newbie-mashing.

Maguire says neither game was shown at the press conference, but they were shown behind closed doors: "I saw them." But he won't be drawn on details or when they will arrive. Although he doesn't "think they will even be shown at Leipzig."

So what did he think of the new-format E3 (whose format is almost certain to change, yet again, for next year)? "I think we felt that E3 suffered by not having that grandeur and the theatrical shows that demonstrate this is a business that generates billions of Euros. It was more like a convention for plumbers. But behind closed doors, there was a decent amount of business going on."

Sony may not dominate that business as it once did, but it certainly feels that everything is in place to have a shot at regaining that once-legendary dominance. If it's right, the first indicator should be an outbreak of LittleBigPlanet-fever in October: watch out for that.