GameDaily BIZ: So what does the cancellation of EA's NBA Live 07 on PS3 this year mean to 2K Sports?

Erik Whiteford: For us, the next-generation market is the real opportunity for the 2K Sports brand and the NBA 2K franchise. We've always felt that we've made a better game than EA, but they have a long brand legacy and a lot of the casual gamers are much more likely to buy a product based on their previous experiences or they might just "follow the herd," but we think the next-gen platforms are a real opportunity for us to clearly distinguish ourselves as the leader in NBA basketball games. And it's starting to showcase itself; the sales on the 360 version are outpacing EA. We had almost 60 percent of the NBA sales on the 360 in October and we're trending higher than them life-to-date if you include September as well. And if you look at the GameRankings aggregated scores, we're far outpacing the NBA Live franchise in terms of game quality, both last year and this year. And I think the consumers are starting to see that and are starting to react to it.

So for us the opportunity is to keep winning consumers by having a great product on the next-gen platforms. And on the PS3 in particular it's sort of a watershed moment for us because the 2K series has never been on a PlayStation system at the hardware launch. The last go around they were focused on the Dreamcast. And EA didn't really have any competition at the PS2 launch from any first- or third-party sports games. They had really strong market share on the PS2 platform throughout the entire lifecycle. But when they do have competition, like when you look back at the PS1 launch they had strong competition from the 989 series and they essentially had to split that market with the competition throughout the whole platform cycle.

So we look at this as a huge opportunity for us to establish ourselves on a Sony platform. Obviously Sony's got their product out there as well in NBA 07, but for both of us it's an opportunity to establish a quality threshold and give that early adopter gamer on the PS3 platform an alternative to an EA Sports experience, and if they like that experience there's a very good chance they'll stick with us in the subsequent years... We were in good position before EA decided to pull out on PS3, but now I think we're in a much better position because the market is a little bit more wide open and we feel very confident that our title is going to be one of those PS3 "killer apps." ... We think we had a lot to do with the fact that EA backed out because they didn't necessarily want to compete against a title that was so much better from a quality perspective, and they admitted it themselves this year that NBA Live had some issues, and we're in the exact opposite [situation]. We've finally come up with a truly next-generation sports gaming experience and we're thrilled with that.

BIZ: What about the notion that third parties had to deal with getting final PS3 dev kits at a late stage? Do you think that affected EA or has it affected 2K?

EW: We didn't have a problem getting the game out for launch. Anytime there's a new hardware platform, getting final dev kits is an issue but I'll pretty much guarantee you that EA got their final dev kits before a lot of the other publishers. I don't think it was an issue. They obviously were going to have to port some of their Xbox 360 version over and that game didn't really live up to expectations, and I don't think there was enough time for them to put enough polish on it to make a significant difference for the PS3 version... Let's face it, plenty of publishers are getting games out on time and EA is not going to get shortchanged on the amount of dev kits they get.

BIZ: Well it just seems that more games that were supposed to be launch titles on PS3 (NBA Live, Oblivion, F.E.A.R., etc.) were pushed back. Is that because of the dev kit situation or perhaps the PS3 tools are hard to work with? What's your perspective?

EW: Any new system is going to have it's challenges to develop for, and a lot of times it takes really, really talented development teams to make those launch windows, and it's a huge challenge... I think it's fairly typical that not all of the titles that are expected at launch are necessarily going to make it at launch. We've heard a lot of rumors about how hard the PS3 is to develop for, but all these new systems have positives and negatives. It's just a matter of working through and figuring out how to take advantage of the positives and work around what might be potential roadblocks... It's certainly a challenge, no question. Final dev kits come out just a few months before the software has to go final. But it's not an impossible challenge, and in some ways it separates the men from the boys.

BIZ: Is it really worth all the effort to be on the PS3 at launch, though, when the installed base will be so small initially?

EW: Well, it is for a couple different reasons, and I absolutely get your point about the small install base. We're not expecting these numbers to be on the level with what the current-gen or even the 360 is going to be, but it's important to establish yourself as a leader. I think early adopters are the guys who are going to go out there and try all the different games; they're going to give more games a shot than they probably would at any other time because they want to figure out which games are going to be the "killer app" for their system. So for us, it really is important to be out there at launch. And also to establish the brand on the PlayStation platform for us is critical... not only to be there first but also to be there with quality products in both NBA and NHL. And from a development standpoint, it's hard when you get one SKU that's out of cycle with the rest of the franchise launches. The more time we spent on NBA 2K7 is less time that we'd be able to spend on next year's version, so it's important to get back in sync so we can have a simultaneous platform release next year.

BIZ: What's your view on 360 vs. PS3? There's a lot of talk about how most third-party titles will look very, very similar on both because it's just not worth the effort/resources to make one much better than the other.

EW: I think the similarities will come less from people planning for one and porting to the other versus the fact that visually speaking both the systems are very similar. Their graphical power is fairly equal, so I don't think that it's one developer might not want to put resources in to try to make either system look better. For us, we're not competing PS3 vs. Xbox 360; we're competing against other sports games and other games in general. It's in our best interests to make whatever game look as good as we possibly can... Our goal is to figure out how to take advantage of the strong points of both systems and program individually for each one of the systems to take advantage of that. My viewpoint is that the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions do look fairly similar, which I think is a good thing; it's good to see that there isn't any noticeable trailing visual component to either one. And I think there's some interesting things going on with the PS3 controller... for example, you can shoot free throws and you can actually shoot using the tilt controller. We're going to continue to look for ways to create meaningful differences where it makes sense.