In a recent interview, Sony's new president, Kaz Hirai, revealed that he is considering reversing his predecessor's policy of not paying to secure Playstation 3 exclusive titles.
"That [paying for exclusives] is something that we can re-evaluate", Mr. Hirai said. "But it's also something that the publishers need to make a business decision on. Ultimately, it becomes a dialogue - if it makes sense for them to go exclusive, that's a business decision that they need to make. 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."
"Where we come into the picture is to have that dialogue with the third-party publishers, to say: 'OK, what can we do together if it's not exclusive that makes the PS3 version of the game more compelling for the consumers than any other version?' 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. Also, it really becomes important for the first-party studios to really come up with some envelope-pushing, genre-defining content."
