Tag Archives: Scott Steinberg

We know gaming can be a healthy pastime for children, but many parents see it as an unnecessary evil. Scott Steinberg, author of The Modern Parent’s Guide book series, hopes to redress the balance.

More »

It looks as though Sony America has lost two of its key executives: VP of marketing Scott Steinberg, and SVP of publisher relations, Rob Dyer.

More »

Did you think it was the end? This is Kevin Butler we’re talking about here.

More »

Killzone 2 has sold 500,000 units, making it the fastest selling first-party title for PS3.

That’s a record according to SCEA’s VP of marketing, Scott Steinberg.

Saying that Sony is “extremely happy with the results,” the exec revealed that Killzone 2 was the highest-selling SCEA PS3 title for the first 30 days out of launch.

Full thing over on Game Daily.

SCEA’s just announced that, as promised, an interactive version of the Killzone 2 “Behind the Bullet” TV ad will be released openly on PSN today.

“This demo will provide an inside look at the making of the commercial, enabling you to take control and slow down the action, move the camera axis and pivot, hear audio commentary from multiple selectable sources such as the art director or technical director at Guerrilla Games, and utilize a variety of buffers and filters to see how every single frame of the commercial was created using the game engine technology,” said PlayStation US marketing head, Scott Steinberg, talking on the PS Blog.

Hot shit. All details through the link.

SCEA marketing chief Scott Steinberg’s claimed 2009 will deliver an unremitting bombardment of high quality product from Sony, and that Killzone 2 is the game that will trigger many to buy a PS3.

“We’re shipping a great lineup and it’s relentless and AAA quality,” Steinberg told GameDaily.

“Starting it with Killzone 2, we’re going to arrest the momentum from competitors with titles like MLB 09: The Show, which some are calling the best sports title ever made.

“Then in summer there’s inFamous and you’ll get to see even more excellent titles at E3. If PlayStation fans thought that we’d rest on our laurels from last year and if competitors thought that we’d punched ourselves out, both are mistaken.”

He added, probably shouting: “We feel that Killzone 2 is a tremendous exclusive. It’s an exclamation point that demonstrates the distance between the PS3 and other systems. The game is 40 gigs and could not be done on anything else. It will move people from the sidelines, and from what we’ve seen from blogs, will push 360 owners to try out the PS3. I think it’s going to be a major launch for us and this historical PlayStation brand.”

Hear Scott roar. Thanks, Joystiq.

SCEA said today that it’s to release “Killzone in 4D,” a real-time version of a US Killzone 2 TV ad to “offer some insight” into the game’s technology.

You can watch the ad in question after the break.

“The Killzone 2 engine is phenomenally powerful,” said SCEA marketing boss Scott Steinberg, writing on the PS Blog.

“To offer you some insight into the technology behind this game, we will release a playable version of this in-engine ad vignette on the PlayStation Network coming in March.

“You’ll be able to control the camera and hear director commentary on how the production was completed using only the game’s technology. The project codename is ‘Killzone in 4-D’ – hope you can check it out.”

Killzone 2 releases on February 27.

More »

SCEA marketing boss Scott Steinberg reckons Sony’s first-party offering in the coming years is going to make competing against PS3 a tough business.

“If you’re a competitor I’ve got bad news for you because we’ve got some absolute blockbusters that are in the works, some of them new IP, some of them existing IP, that we’re building specifically for the PS3,” he said, writing on Edge.

“From a competitive standpoint our competitors are going to have a tougher road now then even in 2008. But for PlayStation 3 consumers, it means more quality and more choice.”

Not scared yet? Not even facing 1,000 tooled up developers?

“It’s a major flaw in some of our competitors that they don’t have the development resources to showcase on a global basis the diversity and the creativity of a development team that’s a thousand strong,” Steinberg added.

“What that means is a huge resource of talent that’s thinking about ways to showcase the technology, who pride themselves on knowing the technology better than anyone, and eking out every last ounce of creative value.”

Don’t cut Scott: he bleeds black. More through the link.

Speaking to GI, SCEA marketing boss Scott Steinberg has claimed that consoles opposing PS3 are starting to show their age.

“I think that we’re seeing, graphically, PS3 games starting to create some distance and some of the other competitors are going to feel that they’re getting long in the tooth, looking quite dated, because they haven’t created that ten-year vision from a horsepower standpoint,” he said.

“So we’re all about looking at ways to keep that bar high, and from a peripheral standpoint the Blu-ray remote helps people get in and out of their digital media, but we’d never consider iterating off of existing competitive technology – because we think that’s a fad and that’s not the way we approach product development. It’s not the way we approach the marketing or the branding of PlayStation.”

Loads more through there. Thanks, EG.

SCEA marketing boss Scott Steinberg has admitted that demand for the 80Gb PS3 SKU in America has taken SCEA by surprise, giving rise to a shortage of the machine.

“Our strategy at the end of the year was to offer up a $399 40Gb, which we thought was the magic price for a Blu-ray machine, and then a $499 80Gb,” he said, speaking to Gamedaily. “What we were surprised to see is that $100 really didn’t matter to a certain customer.

“Our sales were fairly equitable according to TRST and our internal numbers through the holidays and even into January; we’re pretty dry on the 80 GB as a result of us underestimating the demand for the 80 GB and thinking that most folks, because the price message was such a big part of the pundits and the analysts decrying the differences between the 360 and the PS3, [would prefer the 40 GB]. Reality is the price wasn’t that big of a deal and $499 sold a lot more than we thought, so the 80 GB got dry at retail not due to us artificially compressing it but the demand became greater than we thought.”

More through the link. Thanks, Blerk.

Bitter? In no way. SCEA’s marketing boss, Scott Steinberg, reckons most people won’t be bothered with 360′s exclusive GTA IV downloadable content. Well, he would, wouldn’t he.

“[Microsoft] spent the GNP of several small Latin American countries to get that [content], and if you’ve ever played San Andreas…there’s a lot of game to Grand Theft Auto and there’s going to be a lot of game to Grand Theft Auto IV to the point where I think most people will have that Grand Theft Auto experience on the PS3, day and date, same core game shipping on the 360. Perhaps they’ll be shipping some episodic content in the fall, but there is a whole lot of product shipping on the PS3 in April and I personally don’t think there’s going to be a huge percentage of folks who jump into downloadable content for another price when they’re still playing through the core product,” he told GameDaily BIZ.

“So while I do think having that brand on their system was a move for them which they felt they needed to make because they cut a big check for it, I think PlayStation fans know the Grand Theft Auto experience on the PS2 is how they grew up playing Grand Theft Auto,” he continued, “and when you combine GTA IV with MGS 4 and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, all the exclusive content that we’ve got going forward, I think that goes from tipping point to shoving point for consumers who are on the fence, wondering what platform should I buy. I think the clear exclusive message that we have is that the PS3 is where, not only do you get Grand Theft Auto, but you’ll get MGS, you’ll get Gran Turismo and these are also brands that have moved hardware units. It’s the elite of the elite products that actually enable hardware to be sold with software and we’ll have three of them.”

Go Scott. Your blood runs Sony. We salute you.

Big movie here of an interview with SCEA’s Scott Steinberg and Naughtey Dog’s Evan Wells. Firefox is doing its freakishly annoying, “I won’t play Flash movies” thing this morning, so we can’t watch it, but apparently Steinberg says Resistance 2 will fill a dual-layered Blu-ray disc at 50Gb. See after the link.

More »

Calm down. SCEA is so excited by the changing fortunes of PS3 that joy is spilling over into physical contact.

“Without question there’s very much a sense of confidence and renewed enthusiasm,” said Scott Steinberg, VP of product marketing at SCEA. “It happened so fast we can’t help but do a little high-fiving in the office.”

Whoa there, Scott. Remember there are laws about this sort of thing. Steinberg went on to explain just why the Sony team’s so jubilant right now.

“There was a little bit of a Berlin Wall factor going on,” he said. “We were preparing ourselves for a long, drawn-out battle but from CES, things moved extremely rapidly. It probably moved rapidly for our competition too, in the opposite direction. Without question things have developed to the point where it’s great not to have to really dwell on HD-DVD discussions and be able to insert some conversation about our software line-up and talk about SOCOM or talk about LittleBigPlanet.

“We had this Berlin Wall [HD-DVD] and all of a sudden the people decided to tear it down and the next thing you know we’ve got a de facto standard on our hands and it’s our standard.”

Full thing here.

Scott Steinberg, vice president of product marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment America, has said that increased sales of PS3 have taken pressure off the firm to cut the price of the console.

“We’re seeing that the hard-core gamer is not afraid to throw another $100 at the PlayStation 3 because the value proposition is so rich,” Steinberg told Reuters in an interview, speaking on the fact that US consumers are buying “as many $500 models as $400 models”.

“We’re still in the phase of studying what this means for the potential roadmap for the year,” Steinberg said.

Asked if that meant the pricing pressure posited by many analysts had not materialized, Steinberg said. “It’s leading us to think so.”