John Hight, director of product development, Santa Monica Studios, SCEA has an absurdly long title – even if the entire string is relevant, I’m still out of breath – and he has some answers about the state of the Playstation Network. Prior to GDC he spoke with MTV Multiplayer’s Stephen Totilo about the philosophy of the network and future plans.

“My first reaction was, gosh I have all these friends from Atari and Midway and I can bring all these classic arcade games. I even went so far as to try and research what happened to Q*bert… That was funny because I found out after making four or five calls that the person that owned Q*bert, the company that actually owned the license, was Sony,” Hight told Totilo in regards to his feeling that quality is far superior to quantity. The feeling that while Q*bert was a fun little arcade title back in the day, it just wasn’t good enough to port onto the PSN is interesting. Microsoft has obviously gone the opposite route with their XBLA plans, making as many games as possible for the network.

While Microsoft has begun to find some semblance of balance in regards to shilling crap out and releasing quality (or at least decent) titles, the PSN is still releasing too few games to be much of a blip on the digital distribution radar. As Hight mentions in the interview, ”It’s more about each one of these experiences is something special.” That is why the PSN has had any impact. Because games like fl0w and Everyday Shooter are something “special.” He does say that 2008 is showing a ramp up in game releases, we’ll just have to wait and see if that pans out.

Hight also has thoughts on some of PSN’s major problems. First is the lack of demos for the downloadable games. He said, ”We did a demo on Blast Factor and I’ve got 600,000 people playing that demo but I haven’t translated that into 600,000 people buying the game. … I think the demo kind of hurt it in a way and people got satiated. They made a presumption that, ‘oh, ok, the whole game is going to be like this.’ It wasn’t true. The game actually has a lot of depth in each one of the levels.” But if a demo does it’s job – which is to showcase the game – then it should sell games, not eat away the potential market. It may be more that the Blast Factor demo, or the game itself, wasn’t worth buying for those 600,000 people.

You can read the full interview, including Hight’s thoughts on the pricing problems of PSN, over at MTV’s Multiplayer Blog.

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