Director at Sony San Diego talks exclusive licenses and sports game development

IGN posted an article yesterday containing a very thorough interview with Sony San Diego's Senior Director of Product Development Christian Phillips. Among the topics Phillips tackled were exclusive licenses, the perception that sports games don't change year-to-year, and developing Move and Vita titles in San Diego.

Here's the meat of his comments on Tiburon:

Quote:

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Years removed from EA's capture of NFL exclusivity, Phillips freely discussed the Madden franchise that has benefitted so much from a complete lack of competition. Yet, he defended his rival. "There's been a lot of criticism from consumers that they feel like they're not getting the value and they're not seeing the innovation [in Madden]. Now, in fairness to EA, we get some of that criticism on The Show as well."

But is it fair to call Madden more stagnant than it would have been if, say, Sony had its own offering for it to compete with?

"I think it's a tough question to answer, honestly, because we are involved in development and so we know that a lot of things go unseen and unnoticed," Phillips said. "It's very frustrating to us when we read reviews of The Show and we see that people talk about, 'well, it's the same game as last year'... I think that if you spoke to the folks at [Madden developer] Tiburon, they could probably show you reams of design docs that show that, no, it hasn't been that stagnant, that they've actually put in the work, that it's under the hood and that it's in the subtleties."

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Check out the full 3-page article for more: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/122/1223174p1.html