Astro’s Playroom is effectively a welcome mat for all new PS5 owners. That’s an awful lot of pressure…
It’s pressure, but it’s a massive privilege, you know? And if we weigh the two, I would say that the privilege outweighs the pressure. Although like any game, throughout the whole production you’re full of doubts: how are people gonna react to this, to that. There’s a lot of things we have to consider, because there are so many aspects to the game – what experience do we decide to have with the DualSense, how far do we go with the heritage of PlayStation? But it’s also stuff like difficulty, for example. It’s not like you want to put up walls. As much as possible, we want everybody to try all of these instances of DualSense gameplay. So even though we’re building a classic game, we can’t make it too hard. And because it’s a pre-installed game, this kind of day-one experience is going to have a different meaning over time: one, two, three, four years into the future, when people purchase a PlayStation 5 for the first time, it will be that day-one experience but for a different audience. So we also have to consider that. It’s actually a fascinating process to go through.