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Microsoft's Don Mattrick vs. Sony's Kaz Hirai

Five questions we asked the pair of them.

Eurogamer What has been the most important product of this generation?
Don Mattrick

Xbox Live. I think that being the company to build a gaming community, to do it globally, to have all the functionality that we have inside of that, is a pretty staggering accomplishment.

We announced at the show that we've seen our membership from last E3 go from six million to over 12 million, and in the two and a half years we've been operating Xbox Live on 360 consumers have spent over a billion dollars.

A lot of people are talking about rolling out a service or talking about making it work for people. What we've demonstrated is we have that service, we have a large audience that's participated and is valuable, and it's awesome.

Kaz Hirai

I think that it goes without saying - the most important product is the games that play on the PS3 first and foremost. That's always been the most important. I think what differentiates this generation of hardware is, in addition to the games, all the other non-game service and content that we can provide to the consumers through the PS3.

PlayStation Home, Sony's big idea. But where is it?

[In the press conference] we talked about the video delivery service launching here in the United States, and that's a non-game content service that we're providing. We didn't have much time to talk about it and demo it, but Life with PlayStation - completely unrelated to a gaming experience, but nonetheless something you can enjoy on your PS3.

Home is somewhat related to games. It will start as being a very games-centric experience, but it has the potential to expand into other non-game service and applications. This is a B2B play, but the dynamic in-game advertising for example - again, another revenue source that's not related to the traditional way of selling videogames.

So games have always been important, but if I were to single out another element that is going to become more important to the PlayStation business, it's all the non-game-but-network-enabled services and content, which really allows us to expand the horizon, and hopefully the installed base of the PlayStation 3.

And if we can really enhance these services, as well as different content that is considered to be non-game, I think we have two avenues to bring consumers into the platform. One via the traditional way of great videogame console, but there's so much stuff to do. On the other hand, if you're not interested that much in videogames but if there's so much other things to do, they'll buy the PS3 for the other services they can enjoy - and then, since it's a videogame player as well, there are some games they might enjoy. So we can have it both ways.