Phil Harrison on the future

In our feature Flash Forward, available to read in Edge 229, we ask a range of thinkers where gaming might go next, how and why. One of those thinkers is Phil Harrison, who joined Sony in 1992 and has been instrumental in the company’s videogame hardware and software strategies. After helping to launch the PlayStation in 1996, Harrison went on to become president of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios in 2005. In 2008 he retired from the company and recently announced a position on the advisory board of David Perry’s Gaikai cloud-based delivery network. You can read our full, exclusive interview below.

When do you predict we’ll we see a non-physical media future?
Depends where you live: If you live in Korea, it’s already happened, if you live in China, it’s already happened. That’s an easy prediction to make: there is undoubtedly a generation of kids alive on the planet today who will never purchase a physical media package for any of their digital entertainment.

When do you think the first traditional console will go non-physical?
If you’d asked me that question a year ago I’d have been more bullish. But it’s interesting that SCEJ confirmed the… not cancellation, but sort of demise of PSP Go – which I think was a fantastic experiment and I applaud Sony for having at least tried it. I don’t think that’s the end of media-less consoles. On my desk around me I have an iPhone and an iPad and I’m looking really hard at them but I can’t find a disc slot anywhere. 

The console companies, if they wanted to take true market leadership, could do it in the next generation. There’s no reason why Microsoft and Sony, in particular, couldn’t push that change for the next iteration of their major consoles. Nintendo I think will be a little bit further behind, traditionally they have not been at the bleeding edge of technology and I think that Nintendo has got less experience in building their own online infrastructure, unlike Microsoft who’s probably in the lead and Sony who’s catching up fairly quickly.

Where do you think Apple will be in the market a decade from now?
At this trajectory, if you extrapolate the market-share gains that they are making, forward for ten years – if they carry on unrestrained in their growth, then there’s a pretty good chance that Apple will be the games industry.

In what sense?
In the proliferation of devices – you’ve got iPhones, iPads, iPods, which are all part of the same ecosystem; the speed at which Apple sold 15 million iPads is phenomenal. And the number one activity on an iPad, according to some reports, is games, and I think that will only continue.

The fact that the consumer purchase and discovery mechanism is so well integrated – you see something on the App Store, you click a button, the product delivers to your device. That end-to-end shopping experience, if you want to call it that, has been so elegantly built by Apple and they will continue to refine it. 

I probably buy more through Amazon, in terms of value, than any other retailer throughout the year. I find that the rest of the world – meaning Apple, Amazon, Steam – are showing the future of how content will be consumed, adding to that NetFlix and LoveFilm and the like, and that console companies run the risk of becoming a little antiquated unless they change their business model.

What sort of effect do you think this will have on software? Will companies like EA still be in a strong position?
I think new leaders can emerge because the economic factors are different. One of the strengths that EA has at the moment is its physical distribution: they have retail relationships with tens of thousands of retailers around the world and a very efficient distribution mechanism for getting boxes into those stores. But as time goes on, that will become less of a competitive advantage. I think that as the power of retailers decreases proportionate to the whole industry, the strength of the physical distribution force that companies like EA – or to a certain extent Activision, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo – that power starts to be diluted a little bit.