Q: You have shelved the development of Eight Days and The Getaway: what was the thinking behind that?

SY: People were doing the right things on the projects, and there were things in the games that were working really well, but the projects were coming to the end of the pre-production stage, and that is the time when we evaluate every product. Because after that, we would assign more resources to them, and they would really become major investments. This is a regular appraisal process for every project. We do evaluate and cancel projects all the time, because we do start more projects than we finish, and if we finished the same number of projects that we started, that would mean we were not taking any risks at all, and that wouldn’t move our industry on any further.

There are many new ideas that sound very interesting, but we don’t know whether they would really work, or how much it would take to accomplish our vision – that’s why we use the early pre-production stage to try new ideas and measure how much it would take to develop the product. With all that understanding, and with all the other projects that are going on – perhaps other projects are at the same stage and demanding lots of resources from many fronts, because we support many platforms in PS3, PSP, PS2 and PSN – there are more things we want to do than we can, given the number of people and resources. So, it was not like Eight Days was in jeopardy: it was making progress. But it was more about business situations and priorities.

How important is Home? Will it be ready for this Christmas?

SY: We certainly hope so – every indication is positive. With the timing of the launch, we’ve always set target dates, such as the end of last year or spring of this year, but our problem is always implementing features, testing with beta users, getting feedback and making modifications. When we become confident that it is good enough to make it available to all users, that would be the right time. We have been making good progress, but recently, we have been thinking that this fall is the timing we will work towards.