A certain amount of confusion has reigned since Sony announced that the price of the 60Gb PS3 has been cut by $100 in the US – while in the UK, potential PS3 purchasers will instead get a Value Pack, which throws two games and a second Sixaxis controller into the mix, but leaves the PS3’s RRP at £425. Part of the problem was caused by Sony’s initial reluctance to point out that the 60Gb PS3 is being phased out in favour of an 80Gb model in the US, so effectively, the $100 price-cut will only be temporary.

But the fact remains that while a PS3 officially costs £425 in the UK (albeit bundled with more kit than the Americans get), for a while, it will cost just £250 in the US. We thought that the best thing to do would be go straight to the horse’s mouth, and managed to catch up with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s President, David Reeves, who provided a reasoned argument as to why we haven’t had a price-cut in the UK yet (it’s partly because it would annoy everyone who has already bought a PS3) and provided some strong hints that it won’t be too long before we do get a PS3 price-cut over here. Here’s what he said:

Q: So why didn’t we get a PS3 price-cut in the UK?

David Reeves: If you’re a consumer — and we introduced the PS3 in March for £425 or 599 Euros – let’s say you bought one at the end of April and have been using it, playing Resistance: Fall of Man and MotorStorm. We’ve only been on the market for three and a bit months. Our thought process was: “Wait a minute – we’re actually not doing too badly – we’re not selling as well as Wii or DS – but seasonality-wise, compared to, say, PS2 at the same time we launched it in 2001, we’re actually doing quite well on a regional level”. It’s exactly the target that we sought. July is not really a gamers’ month unless you get a big, big title. So we thought if we reduced the price, we’d annoy a lot of people. We did think about it, but we also felt that it wasn’t doing that badly. In the US, they’ve been going for more than six months, so they took the decision that going down in price was a better thing to do than a value pack.

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As promised, we were able to get your questions over to the Insomniac team. Here’s what they had to say:

1. I would like to know if Insomniac takes inspiration for some of its weapons (especially in Resistance) from real world weapons?

Nathan Fouts, Weapons Programmer: Absolutely. We like taking modern-day weapons as inspiration and building on those. We also like taking physics phenomenon and natural occurrences and trying to blend them with weapons. For instance, the air-fuel grenade was based on real weapons but also on slower fluid dynamics, while the Hedgehog grenade was based on ”Bouncing Betty” mines and Cholla cactus. The look of a homing tag locked on the environment using the Bullseye was inspired by the classic Bohr model of the atom (with bullets homing on the tag mimicking swirling electrons).

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At the recent Sony European press event at the 3Rooms, we were surprised and gratified to get a short but sweet audience with a man who is fast becoming a legend: David Jaffe, the man behind God of War. In this instance, Jaffe had his Calling All Cars hat on – explaining that the experience of creating what, for our money, is the best of the PS3 download games was so happy that he has more such games in the pipeline. This is what he said – over Eye Toy video-link from San Diego.

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Here’s some answers from Sony to a selection of PlayStation Eye questions.

Does the new Eye differ from EyeToy much?
“It’s superior to EyeToy in nearly every way: four times the resolution, two times the frame-rate, two times the sensitivity and no compression artefacts. It has two fundamental new features: a two-setting optical zoom lens, and a built-in microphone array.”

Is the EyeToy even compatible with the PS3?
“Yes, but the picture quality is inferior to the PS Eye.”

Is the PlayStation Eye backward compatible with the PS2?
“No.”

What software comes with the camera? And what software and games will be available at launch or in the near future?
“It’s supplied with EyeCreate, which allows people to save photos, video and audio clips, as well as editing them and create truly individual movies using the different capture modes such as time-lapse and slow motion. Future software and games planned for use with the Eye will include Eye of Judgement, Ember, Skyblue and Aqua Vita, but the list will grow considerably over time.”

It sounds nice but what does ‘ability to reduce background noise and focus on the spoken word for smoother, more accurate speech recognition and transfer’ mean to a consumer?
“PS Eye’s high-quality mic array allows PS3 to analyse the audio input and separate human voices from other sounds, such as fans, traffic sounds, laundry, vacuums, etc. This makes your voice clearer on the other side during chat, and makes it easier for games with speech recognition to understand what you are saying.”

Can the PS Eye work in low light?
“It’s much more sensitive than EyeToy, to the extent that although it still works best in a well-lit room, it can produce reasonable quality video by simply using the illumination given off by the television set.”

If you compare the PlayStation Eye with a normal digital camera, how does the zoom lens compare?
“The lens on PlayStation Eye has two optical settings: normal, which is a 56 degree field of view and wide, which is a 72 degree field of view. This is similar to some point-and-shoot cameras. The normal setting is similar to EyeToy’s configuration and the addition of the wide setting is intended for full-body tracking. The user can switch the setting according to match his desired experience.”

And how does the frame rate compare to other web cams?
“It has a very fast frame rate. Most webcams max out at 30 frames/sec, but the Eye typically runs at 60 frames/sec, which makes it twice as responsive and can also run at 120 frames/sec mode for extreme high-speed tracking applications. This makes it a very unique camera.”

What format(s) do the video and audio save in?
“All video and audio files produced via the Eye are specific files created for use only on EyeCreate, the software available free with the Eye. These files cannot be used on the XMB and therefore not exported.”

Here’s a belated interview with Phil Harrison by Steve Boxer, our man at GDC - taken from the Blogger’s Round Table debate.

On Game 3.0:

Phil Harrison: We wanted to establish the idea that, as an industry, we could unify some thinking into a statement called Game 3.0. It’s more about philosophies than directions, and we’re trying to give a label to some things that were happening in the industry anyway.

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Insomniac Games Chief Creative Officer Brian Hastings discusses why the PS3 is the console to beat

First of all, let me make it clear that Insomniac is a 100% independent development studio. Sony has neither endorsed nor authorized what I’m writing here.

When I started this blog post I was planning to write about Home and Little Big Planet from a developer’s perspective. But as I read some of the media and message board responses to Sony’s GDC presentation, I wanted to address an ongoing industry phenomenon. Specifically, the sheer volume of negative spin toward Sony from both the mainstream press and the internet community. Mere minutes after Sony announced a beautiful, ground breaking, free, community-enhancing online PS3 service, 100 internet posters were trying to argue that this was somehow a bad thing. Whether you love or hate Sony, if you’re trying to spin Home as a bad thing I can only conclude that you’re part of Microsoft’s $3.2 billion viral marketing campaign.

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The day after Phil Harrison’s keynote speech at GDC, we had a chance to interview him. Naturally, the focus was on the implications and details of Home and LittleBigPlanet. Obviously there were things that Harrison was reluctant to divulge just yet, but his answers offer some good insight into the two hotly anticipated items.

Q: Home looks great, but it begs a few questions. Presumably there will be moderation, at least in the public spaces?

PH: Exactly right. Public spaces will be moderated, and we’ll use the same rules of parental control as we do for the PlayStation Network, so parents can control whether people have access to the network or not. Then, in the private spaces, it’s unmoderated - exactly in the same way that you can send an e-mail to somebody with an attachment on it, or you could have a video chat with somebody.

Q: In terms of some of the actions you can do within the world, presumably there’s no adult content there?

PH: Well, it’s absolutely deliberate that there is no physical impact between characters, between avatars. We are going to have animations that will allow you to shake somebody’s hand or to have some social touch but in a very, you know, appropriate way. But no, we’re not going to have ‘those’ kind of animations that I’m imagining that you’re thinking about.

Q: What about uploading porn from your PS3’s hard-disk to your private space? And maybe inviting people you don’t necessarily know back and them being slightly offended by what they see, then going to a moderator?

PH: Well I’m disappointed that you would use those as the first questions. I think Home should be used for a much wider and more beneficial scope than that, but I think that people can express their creativity inside Home in a wide variety of ways and it’s not necessarily for us to dictate what that should be. However, if somebody feels uncomfortable about an encounter on Home, it’s very easy for them to ban that person from their friends list…

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Yet again, a seemingly innocent press release from Sony – detailing the specification of the PAL territory PlayStation 3 – has been met with the reception you’d expect if the sky started falling in. That, as we all know, is because it revealed that PAL (why is Sony still calling them PAL, since HDMI renders the whole concept of PAL, NTSC and Secam redundant?) PS3s will have had the Emotion Engine chips surgically removed from their motherboards, so backwards compatibility with PS2 games will be achieved via software emulation. Sony’s decision to point consumers towards a website (http://faq.eu.playstation.com/bc) detailing which PS2 games will be playable on the PS3, but which won’t go live until March 23 also hardly made PlayStation enthusiasts feel any less unloved. But we have good news: we managed to snatch a quick interview with head of worldwide studios Phil Harrison, in between putting the finishing touches to his Game Developers’ Conference keynote, and what he said firmly puts the contentious issue of backwards compatibility into storm-in-a-teacup territory.

Harrison would not be drawn on specific PS2 titles which will be playable on PS3 on March 23, but it seems the only problem we will have is deciding which ones to play: “The situation is changing every day, but on March 23, we expect the list to include over 1,000 PS2 titles.” That enough for you? Even when you’ve played your way through MotorStorm, Resistance: Fall of Man, Ridge Racer 7, Virtua Tennis 3, Call of Duty 3, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Formula One Championship Edition and so on?

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We were slightly taken aback by the general outcry on the web when the official announcement came through that the 60Gb PS3 would cost £425 in the UK – after all, Sony Computer Entertainment’s UK managing director Ray Maguire had said that he “expected” it to cost £425 as far back as last year’s E3 Show.

But we can see why the controversy arose – after all, the PS3 costs roughly £300 in the US and (an anomalously low) £250 in Japan. So there was only one thing for it: to seek out Mr Maguire himself and get him to explain. Oh, and while he was at it, he revealed that there will be 220,000 PS3s in the shops at launch – an awful lot more than people were expecting, and possibly the highest ever number of consoles available at launch. Anyway, this is what Ray said.

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Are there any Easter eggs in Cross Media Bar that you could show us?

A lot of these applications have been written by people who have written games, so I’m sure there are interesting little things in there. There are some secrets, but I can’t tell you otherwise I’d have to kill you.

What prototypes did the external design of PS3 go through?

There were two no, three actually. One that was very much in the mould of traditional consumer electronics: slab fronted, and that never moved beyond the conceptual phase. This [the final design] is the one Kutaragi-san spent the most time on, although it did evolve a little bit from E3 2005. The basic shape is the same, even though it’s a bit bigger. Then there was another one that was a bit more out there, but I can’t tell you what it looked like because we may see it in other devices.

What impact will downloadable content have on the way games are made?

It’s a fantastic opportunity to continue to satisfy the demands of gamers, and having the community functionality embedded into the console means that on Monday I can launch a new level, on Tuesday I can see what people are saying about it, on a Wednesday I can respond to that feedback and on a Friday I can put into QA [Quality Assurance] a revised version of the next episode for delivery on a Monday. [At this point Phil has an idea for a Christmas-themed Motorstorm bonus called Snowstorm, and rushes off to write it down.]

Is episodic gaming something that you are keen to experiment with?

We are doing a couple of things which are bang on that objective. The area that I’m most excited about at the moment is empowering user-created content. Embedding the user creation tools into the game application and opening it up to a cloud of users. That’s the trend I’m most excited about.

On the most basic level you’re talking about map makers, but how far could user-created content go with PS3?

Well, I have to be really careful not to give the game away because we’re keeping this secret, but don’t think about it in terms of maps, think of it in terms of behaviours, environments, physics, rules all the tools that you could want, but in a very consumer friendly way.

Would you create this content using the pad, or a mouse and keyboard?

The vast majority of the experience could be done with the pad, but for the small investment of plugging in a USB mouse there might be a second level, or a deeper level of finesse, that you could get in terms of pixel manipulation and paint programs or fine tuning things. Different users will have different wants; some will go all the way down to buying the special software that allows them to create their super levels. 95% of users are happy to be the consumer, but 5% are incredibly fanatical about creating a huge amount of content and the whole community benefits from it, and that is a really interesting trend. Look at Second Life. Everything about the experience is user-created content. That is a very, very powerful metaphor for where we’re going. We’ve got two things in development. One in this building and one with an external developer that, when we do share them with you, I think you’re going to go Ah now I know what he was talking about.

Can you tell us more about Afrika?

The game is non-violent, as you would expect. Videogames have always been a lot about wish fulfilment I wish I could be a Formula 1 driver, I wish I could be a striker for Liverpool. That’s a fairly well established desire. One thing that hasn’t been explored is the ability to go places and have experiences that either through time or cost or safety you wouldn’t be able to do in real life.

Finally, what is your favourite game-playing moment on any PlayStation?

Bloody hell! The cardboard box in Metal Gear Solid. God Of War just all of God Of War. On PS3, it’s seeing two cars collide realistically in Motorstorm, but the crash being nothing to do with me. Just the fact that I was hoofing it around, and I laughed at how they crashed. I had nothing to do with it it was an event that just unfolded around me. It’s great that Evolution have delivered that experience. I’m so proud of what they’ve done.