MSNBC Journalist Biased Against Sony? Well duh.

I was recently pointed in the direction of the personal blog of David Jaffe, a well-known video game designer who is not afraid to speak his mind about everything from his day job to his political views. In a recent post he listed a selection of questions he received from an MSNBC journalist along with his feelings towards their tone.

Below are the questions he was asked:

In hindsight, noting the PS3′s lukewarm reception and relatively high cost, a lot of people wonder what Sony was thinking when developing the PS3. So… what were they thinking?

It’s been said that Ken Kutaragi and Howard Stinger dictated what technology the PS3 should include instead of doing proper research to what the consumer wanted while paying little mind to price. As a development partner, did you feel that was the case? Why/why not?

It seems that releasing a feature-rich console for $600, now $400, was a crippling move for Sony, especially given the recent economic downturn. Would you agree? Why/why not?

Did you ever perceive low morale within the company once the $600 price was announced in 2006? Can you elaborate? Consumers appear indifferent to Blu-ray technology. Do you feel Sony overvalued Blu-ray, after DVD helped the PS2 become such a huge success?

It seems the PS3 has been cobbled together since its release: feature-cutting to help cut costs, patched with controller rumble, patched with Home, patched with trophy achievements — like the console never had a specific plan. During your tenure, did you feel the powers that be at Sony had a grip on what exactly would make the PS3 a success? Why/why not? What has been your biggest concern as a PS3 developer?

Was the Wall Street Journal right: has hope faded for PS3 as the “comeback player”?

As you can see from the video at the top of the page, Jaffe was less than impressed with what seems to be a set of questions with obvious bias against the PS3 and Sony. The first red flag (which I embarrassingly failed to notice until it was pointed out to me) is the fact that the writer claims to be writing for MSNBC, a Microsoft company. That combined with the obviously negatively skewed selection of queries does propose an interesting question; Is this biased journalism or just a writer asking an innocent set of questions?

To me it seems quite obvious that bias is present. Even if the questions are somehow innocent, he must have realised how stupid it is to ask a Sony-exclusive developer a bunch of questions about how and why the PS3 sucks. As open a man Jaffe is with his opinions and experiences, I  sincerely doubt that he would be stupid enough to answer anything that would damage the relationship between himself and his employers.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about so-called “bias” in the industry, with most of it aimed at Killzone 2 (and yes as you can obviously tell due to my phrasing and tone, that I was actually saying that I loathe Killzone). Apparently a perfect score is not good enough nowadays but that’s a whole other subject that I’ll avoid re-hashing. I did however get into a very interesting discussion with a friend where he insisted that bias is necessary to the games industry. Yes, yes; I have had him checked for signs of retardation but somehow he was given a clean bill of health. Once I finally managed to pick my jaw up from the floor and let him explain himself I could see (in a very convoluted way) how he could say that. Basically, for a platform-specific news outlet you could say that bias is already present as they only report on a specific set of games based on a single platform. Personally I wouldn’t go as far as to call this bias, more akin to knowing your market and producing the content they want. Especially with consoles, not many people own more than one and therefore are less likely to care about things that they would not be able to use.

Since the first article was posted Jaffe has posted a response. He will be answering retooled questions and talking to  the journalist on a podcast. The fact of the matter is a Microsoft employee was asking a guy who develops exclusively for Sony platforms to reinforce a pile of negativity aimed squarely at the his employer. I’ll be keeping an eye on his blog to see the answers to the resubmitted questions and to hear the two of them have a chat about the issue at hand and PS3 games in general.