uring this week’s Sony Gamers’ Day in San Diego, both Billy and Kato got a few moments with Sony Computer Entertainment’s Senior Vice President of Marketing, Peter Dille to ask a number of questions. We hit up such pertinent topics as the new PSP download network, second-gen titles, new rumble controllers, PSP 2.0, and much much more.

Game Informer: What’s it like to not have to do E3 until July?

Peter Dille: Well, we are going to have to do E3, so we’re not completely off the hook. I think it comes back to that it’s really important to talk to the press this time of the year. You’ve got long lead press. You’ve got a market that needs to understand what are the plans. We want to show everything. If we waited until July and just showed up at E3, it’s really too late to generate a lot of the momentum behind the products that we want, so we need to start now and that’s why we’re doing a big event like this–focusing on games.

GI: You’ve got a lot playable games here, and you announced SOCOM today [ed: SOCOM: Confrontation]. Can we expect SOCOM playable at E3? Killzone at E3?

Dille: Yeah. I think all the stuff you can have playable at E3. And then the one we’ve been holding back on is Killzone, so it’s a good reason for you to come to E3, because we’ll have some updates on that. By all means, you need to save something to keep people interested.

GI: One of the things that was discussed was the fact that the PSP will have some sort of online network for downloading content. Are you talking music and movies? Is that the plan, and will it be through Sony Connect?

Dille: We were a little bit coy about revealing all of the plans, but I think all of the above. We’re looking at downloading games, and you can do that now via the PlayStation Store on PS3. Download it on the PS3, slide it over to your PSP, take a PS1 classic or other content directly to your PSP. The missing ingredient for us has been making it easier for consumers to get video content or music content to the PSP, because the device has this awesome technical playback capability, awesome screen built for video and yet we don’t make it terribly easy for people to access any content. So we’re looking to fix that. We’ve got a lot of people hard at work on it we look forward to rolling that plan out and that service out later this year. But be patient, we hope it won’t be much further.

GI: Will this be something you’ll be able to do over Wi-Fi, or will you have to connect your PSP to your PS3?

Dille: We haven’t really announced details, but, again I think if you look at that product I think you can get a bit creative and say, it already connects to the PS3, it’s got Wi-Fi connectivity, I think both paths are open to us.

GI: Was the Home feature created as something responding to a need or a want that PS3 owners have expressed? That they want some open world or was it more something that you created and hoping that they’ll adopt?

Dille: It wasn’t in response to what they wanted, because when Home was started there were no PS3 owners so we didn’t know what they wanted. Home has been in development for a while. It would have been nice to have had it on November 17th, but our perspective is don’t announce things too early. You never have a second chance to make a first impression. I think Home really demonstrates the creativity and unique approach that we have to this business. When we were preparing to launch PS3 a lot of people said, “Okay, I guess they’re going to match Live feature by feature and we’ll just expect a derivative approach.” That’s not Sony’s way of doing things. We take a step back and say, we want online gaming for sure. Resistance you’ve got 40-player multiplayer on November 17th. Check that box. But Home from my perspective leapfrogs the competition. What’s going on with community in the console environment, because now you’ve got a true 3D based community. You’re not going to see anything like Home on any other platforms. I think it really speaks to the creativity and individuality you’ve seen in PlayStation products throughout the years.

GI: In one of the demonstration with Ratchet, they were talking about it as second generation of PS3 titles. Do you expect your third-party partners to also be on that second wave even though that some partners, say Ubisoft, may have been holding back from their first titles.

Dille: You have to have a first-generation title to have a second-generation title. Insomniac had Resistance: Fall of Man, so they’re able to share some of that tech, and have a second-gen title like Ratchet. I think if you look at other second-gen titles, NBA ‘08 from the Sony studio, that’ll be a second-gen. But if you go out to the third parties, you have to say, “Okay, who had launch titles? And which of those will be second-gen?” You guys would probably know better than I would with what is going on with the third party community. But you can look at what the launch line-up was last year and say, “Who’s working on a sequel? Is it Madden? Is it Tony Hawk?” I’m not saying those are the answers.

GI: Do you expect those third-party partners to come up to speed a little quicker, a little easier?

Dille: Absolutely. Number one, you always come up to speed on your own, because the first one is the hardest, and things get better with second-gen—that’s kind of the beauty with second-gen. I think some of the things we’re doing on our side are helping them get up to speed. We talked at GDC about sharing our tech with the third-party community, the whole EDGE initiative, we’ve had some really great feedback to that. So I think that’s helping them ramp up the learning curve. The PlayStation 3 is a very technically advanced system. Any help we can give, sharing some of those secrets I think are really welcome by the third party. I think it’s helping.