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Eurogamer: The peer-review system seems like it has the potential to be used outside XNA. One of the things that's in the headlines a lot is Epic's problem of wanting to do modifications for Unreal Tournament 3. Is the peer-review system something that could be reused to allow modified content of that nature?Chris Satchell: There's two parts to that question. Let me address the first one. I think, assuming we're successful, I think the pipeline really is an incredible piece of innovation that will definitely enable other scenarios, and what's important about it is it's really addressing some of the problems with user-generated content.I think we're seeing from some of the lawsuits out there - outside of our industry - that just saying you have reactive takedown isn't enough. You need to be more proactive about protecting people's IP and having content that's acceptable. So I think that's a major innovation. I absolutely believe that our pipeline, if successful, can help inform the design of those or even be used directly for other parts of our business.Now the modding's a little different. Yes it could help rate mods, but the core issue of modding is what we talked about earlier - if you're not running in that sandbox, how do you guarantee security?That's really where we've got stuck - making sure that nothing will hurt the user's system, and I'm a little disturbed when I think about other systems and people using what we call native code - code that goes right down to the metal - and then allowing people to run script mods on top of that without the right security measures. It could be really dangerous.We've drawn a hard line because we very much care about security, and it seems like some other platforms don't seem to care quite as much. That kind of worries me for consumers. But all I can control is what we do on our platform, so that's where I'm going to focus - we're going to keep you safe because that's really important to us.Eurogamer: So not even needing to read between the lines, you're saying that there's a potential risk to consumers of PS3?Chris Satchell: I think there's a potential risk on any platform where you're allowing...where you're running in what we call native mode, where you're writing straight to the metal, not a sandbox layer like XNA, and then that runs a script engine and you let people do that in that script engine.Really what works in this industry is the people who have access to that native metal of the console, that go through these processes, are financially invested in this industry; they wouldn't do anything bad. Developers want to do good things because they want this industry to work. There's a lot of people out there that just want to prove they can screw things up.I think there's very mature, sensible hackers who just want to prove how good they are, and they don't cause harm, and there's malicious hackers, and any platform that let's you do that, and doesn't have the right security measures in place - whether it's Sony, whether it's Nintendo, whether it's Apple, whether it's anyone - you're inviting trouble, because sooner or later someone will want to prove they can do it.
