Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Phil Harrison recently confronted the uncomfortable issue of arrogance by Sony in an interview with Joystiq: “There’s always going to be a risk when you are market leader for ten years that we start to lose perspective; and we have to make sure that we don’t lose perspective. But I don’t think we’re arrogant, I think we have to recognize that we’re in a highly competitive industry and that anything that we say will be eternally editorialized by professionals and consumers alike. So we’re always in the spotlight.”
The interviewer went on to ask if Sony’s PR was hurting them. “Is PR hurting Sony at the moment? You have things like notable Sony representatives saying that Microsoft copies Sony when in fact I’d say that they feed off each other equally. Do you think that’s hurting Sony?” Phil Harrison responded to this by saying that “I think you can always take quotes out of context…” Take it from me, from my experience with certain publishers, they expect game sites to be a mouthpiece for their products. Phil Harrison and Sony aren’t the only ones that shy away from real questions. My question to Phil would have been: “how could you manage to change public perception to where you guys are more arrogant than Microsoft?”
