SCEJ president Hiroshi Kawano speaks to 4Gamer

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...-610x3441.jpegFollowing Sony’s E3 2013 conference, Japanese game site 4Gamer.net sat down with SCEJ president Hiroshi Kawano to fill in a few blanks regarding Sony’s future plans, from the price point of PS4 to how Vita is integrated into its plans going forward.When asked whether the announcement of PS4’s price point at $399 was deliberately intended to undercut Xbox One at $499, Kawano replied: “The price point for PS4 was not set as a reaction to our competitors. Of course, we’d like to sell it for as high a price as possible [laughs], but we held long discussions about what the reasonable price would be, and that’s how we came to $399.”Microsoft’s decision to include Kinect with every Xbox One no doubt contributed to that extra $100, and it’s a gamble that Sony chose not to make with PS4’s PS Camera. “We decided to keep the PS Camera as an optional device,” explained Kawano. “One reason is that we weren’t sure we could prepare titles that take full advantage of the PS Camera in time for the PS4’s launch date. We might consider a bundle at a later date, when such titles are ready.”PS4 will require a PlayStation Plus subscription to play online and to take advantage of PS4’s other connected features, much as Xbox 360 does today. Although PS Plus has become a popular service in the West, thanks largely to an impressive roster of titles in its Instant Game Collection, in Japan it has yet to really take off.“As part of the evolution from PS3 to PS4, the services had to evolve too, such as the ability to share video and photos and to save to the cloud – these features are all more advanced than on PS3,” said Kawano when asked about the new PS Plus prerequisite. “This required a capital investment, and so we determined that in order to provide a powerful user-oriented service, it was necessary to standardise PS Plus.”

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