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."

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PSN Senior Director Susan Panico works hard for the money.

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.

Crispy Gamer: As far as launch stuff goes, though, what's been the hardest thing to launch?

Panico: In my PlayStation Network role, the hardest thing was when we launched the PlayStation 3. At the time, we just didn't quite know what was going to happen when the switch was turned on. We had been working really closely with Japan and providing them with a lot of our product requirements and telling them what works culturally in our market, telling them about a lot of the features we wanted to see and what we needed to be competitive. So they took all that information in, and we waited to see what it would be like when it launched. We were very happy with where we netted out.

Crispy Gamer: But you weren't satisfied completely?

Panico: We've made a lot of improvements and we have a really great relationship with Japan and the engineering team there. It's a very collaborative process. For example, the video delivery service (for movies) launched on Tuesday. We were planning it for months and it was a united effort. We were proud of that.

Crispy Gamer: What's your proudest achievement so far?

Panico: You know, there are actually a few. I have a very, very talented team of about 30 people who are all very passionate about our end goal, delivering this complete entertainment service. They all work their butts off. Regarding the video delivery service, the PlayStation Network team has been working 20 hours days for a few weeks now. They pulled it together and took the stress in stride.

Crispy Gamer: Personally, what game do you like the best so far?

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Fat Princess is Panico's favorite game right now. She's chunky -- the Princess, not Susan.

Panico: One of the games that hasn't come out yet is called Fat Princess. It's a multiplayer online game where you're the blue team or the red team. You basically want to keep the princess and you can keep getting her chunkier by feeding her cake. It's kind of like capture the flag, but you do it with the princess.

Crispy Gamer: Why do you want to keep her, er, chunky?

Panico: [laughs] I was trying to be politically correct. You're trying to make her more difficult to move. You want to keep her in your zone. By feeding her, you make it more difficult for the other team to move her to their zone. I think the great thing about the Network as a whole is original content like this, and original programming. You're not going to see ideas like that on other consoles.

Crispy Gamer: Do you look at the competition to see what they're doing at all? Do you ever wish, gee, I wish we had 300 games, or whatever the total is on Xbox Live?

Panico: Obviously, we wouldn't be doing our job if we didn't look at the competitive marketplace across gaming and video services. We're really focused on the consumer. For us, it's not about quantity, but about quality. We would rather have a hundred really funky, indie games that you can't get anywhere else than have 300 arcade titles that you can pretty much get online on the PC for free. For us, it's more about delivering [games like] PixelJunk Monsters and Fat Princess. Pain is a great title as well.

Crispy Gamer: I hear what you say about quality over quantity. But do you think that PlayStation Network games will ever come out with more frequency than they do now?

Panico: I think it's possible. It depends what the team's goal is. We are fairly new. We've only been around for a year and a half. I think the development community is still figuring out how to take advantage of content delivery and what the delivery method does for game making.

Crispy Gamer: What do you mean?

Panico: One of the things you'll probably see in the near future is more episodic-type content. It will be either in graphic novel storytelling or in games themselves. Some of them will probably introduce all new genres all together.

Crispy Gamer: We see all these numbers about downloads. Right now, what do people seek out on the Network most?

Panico: We see a pretty good split across the board regarding multiplayer, downloadable games, downloadable content. Plus, we just introduced a TV show called "Qore." It's our first foray into original programming.

Crispy Gamer: You know, the thing I hate most about the PlayStation Network is "Qore."

Panico: Really? I would love for you to tell me why.

Crispy Gamer: I was really disappointed with it. The woman who hosts seemed not ready for prime time. I thought the writing was bad: I mean, who wrote we'll have lots of "surprising surprises"? It seemed illiterate. I just felt whoever was doing the canned interviews was so low-key that it passed on to the developers who answer them. They just did not seem excited about their own games.

Panico: I hear you. We're ramping up on our original programming and bringing an executive producer on board, someone who has a lot of TV, film, commercial and video experience. We were very proud of the achievement in terms of the product that we delivered in that we delivered high-definition plus interactivity in a downloadable format.

Crispy Gamer: So what should this show be?

Panico: I think where we want to take it is to be a lot more lifestyle and entertainment-oriented. We want to be the "TRL" of PlayStation. I definitely think there's a lot of room to grow with "Qore." You'll see improvement. Stick with it, because I think you'll be really happy.

Crispy Gamer: Tell us about the new Ratchet & Clank.


Panico: Well, it will be downloadable for $14.99. It's taking something people love and that's familiar. It will broaden what's on the Network.

Crispy Gamer: How did that come about? Why Ratchet & Clank and not something else?

Panico: I think there are two things. It helps bridge the time lapse between the franchises, so it gives people more of a taste of one of the franchises they love without having to wait two years for a PS3 game to be developed. It also introduces people to the franchise by giving them something that's a lot quicker to play. Since it's not a full game, they can get introduced to the characters and the gameplay really fast. I'm not really sure how long the game is; we can check. But I think it's like, four or five hours.

Crispy Gamer: A pretty good deal in these troubled times. Can you give me an idea of what these games cost to make, even a range?

Publicist: We can't really talk about dev. costs.

Panico: I probably can't release actual numbers. But it allows independent game makers who don't have huge budgets to have the opportunity to get into the game space at an affordable price. It's definitely a fraction, a small fraction, of the cost of a PS3 game.

Crispy Gamer: Can someone get in for a couple hundred thousand dollars?

Panico: Yes, definitely they could.

Crispy Gamer: So what do you need to do to make the PlayStation Network better?

Panico: My biggest thing to make it better is something that Jack [Tretton] talked about at the press conference, something that's coming out this fall. It's single sign-on. I think that with kids growing up digitally -- and all of us, for that matter -- one of the things that's really important for people is ID. People will be able to take that wherever they go on the Internet. Your identity can go with you on the PlayStation Network, in Home, on PlayStation.com, on your favorite social networking site. And you'll be able to take your game accomplishments and rankings with you. As we advance more with original programming, we hope to migrate people from the cable set-top box in the living room with compelling content. You look at the Pimp My Rides of the world, things that are socially relevant, socially engaging, and that become part of pop culture --we want to make the PlayStation Network a destination.

Crispy Gamer:So "Qore" isn't the only show you'll do?

Panico: [smiles knowingly] No. We have some pretty cool things coming down the pipeline that probably take more of a pop culture slant than "Qore" does. We want to do things that the kids are going to eat up and love.