PlayStation Network Honcho Susan Panico -- In the Firing Line

8/6/2008 6:29 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 4

Videogame company PR departments try to make stars out of executives and game developers, often with disastrous results. But the people behind some of the most exciting console developments are rarely interviewed, spoken about, or recognized. So it has been with Susan Panico, the senior director of the very hot, often innovative PlayStation Network. I sat down with Panico to discuss the challenges she deals with daily, Fat Princess, downloadable movies and the currently not-ready-for-prime-time video magazine show, "Qore."

Crispy Gamer: Can you tell me about your history with Sony?

Susan Panico: I've been with Sony since I got out of college -- since, like, 1994. It was my second job out of college. I worked for Sony ImageSoft when we made games for Sega and Nintendo. A year later, I moved up to Foster City for the PlayStation launch. I had every job in the marketing group. I was overseeing product marketing and handled the advertising launches for PSP and PlayStation 3. Then, in February '07, they created the PlayStation Network department and asked me to go over and oversee that.

Crispy Gamer: When Sony asked you to do that, did you have concerns or questions?

Panico: I've always been involved in it from a marketing and business standpoint. But I had questions about the front- and backend and encoding, in which I'm definitely not an expert. But I have a passion for branding and love making things mean something to people. It was a good opportunity for me to have a full business to run. I also really, really believe in the convergence of all this media, which I think is really going to ultimately set us apart in the future. So I wanted to be part of the team that brought that together.

Crispy Gamer: The Network is arguably the most interesting thing about the PS3 because it lets you experiment a fair amount. What's been the biggest challenge so far?

Panico: The biggest challenge is that we're doing things that haven't been done before. We have a great technology platform in the PlayStation 3. It's really just figuring out how to take advantage of the technological capabilities and bring that to the consumer in a user-friendly way .

Crispy Gamer: But in particular, what's the hardest challenge?

Panico: [pauses] We're really the only company that is poised to have both the content (software on the entertainment side) married with the hardware side and bridged together with services. And it's a very complex endeavor, not only because of who we are (at SCEA), but because of the greater Sony corporation and all the assets that we have to fool around with. So the challenge is to be able to deliver all these forms of entertainment on one device.

Crispy Gamer: It's a lot of stuff. I imagine you're in meetings all day.

Panico: Pretty much from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, I'm in meetings somewhere.

Crispy Gamer: How do you pull back from that and make the more important decisions?

Panico: Many are cut-and-dry decisions. You make them and keep going. You ask yourself constantly, is this something the consumer is going to enjoy and benefit from? Usually that answer is pretty clear. In a large corporation, though, there are things that require collaboration and discussion. You try to get those moving as quickly as possible.