Speaking to SPOnG regular Steve Boxer, on the semi-official Sony PlayStation blog recently, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO, Kaz Hirai has taken a reality check on the idea of exclusives.

When Steve asked him if he had SCEI has changed Phil Harrison's policy of not paying for exclusives, Hirai skated around the subject, saying, "That’s something that we can re-evaluate, but it’s also something that the publishers need to make a business decision on."

The reality of the situation, however, appears to have penetrated SCEI HQ. That reality being that unless paid for, exclusives simply do not make as much cash for third-party publishers as multi-platform games.

Hirai states, "But generally speaking, because of the investments that publishers need to make in this round of hardware, it’s going to be more difficult for publishers to make that decision."

He then explains how Sony intends to make multi-platformers more compelling, "Let’s face it – all the games are coming out on a Blu-ray disk which has 50Gb capacity, so let’s put in some making-of content, or maybe additional levels."

So, a point to Blu-ray after all. All this downloadable content, well, that's just not on. Kaz points out, "You also have to realise that different countries all have broadband, but the speeds are different, and then there are some territories where there isn’t too much broadband infrastructure at this point in time. When you look at it from a worldwide business perspective, the most efficient way of delivering 50 gigabytes, say, is going to be on a disk for a while to come."

Finally, it's good to know that the PS3 is once and for all a games machine and not an uber-super-multimedia computer. This is because Hirai repositioned it as such - and now he thinks its going in the right direction. After all, as he points out, "It hasn’t been a year yet since Kutaragi-san left, but I think things are heading in the right direction..."

Ouch!

^Threespeech