Sony aims for comeback win with PS3

The last year couldn’t have been easy for Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America.

The Playstation 3 llaunch last Thanksgiving was marred by hardware shortages and bad press
over the high price and the lack of exclusive titles. And worse: The
PlayStation 3 has consistently finished third to Microsoft’s Xbox 360
and Nintendo’s Wii in monthly sales.
But
Tretton shrugs off the slew of bad news, saying that Sony is taking the
long view with the PlayStation 3. They’ve played this game before, he
says, and they’ve taken home the trophy more often than not.

“The first year is important, but it’s the
first inning of a nine-inning baseball game,” he says. “You’re not
going to win many baseball games if you panic when you’re down 1-0 in
the first inning.”

No one can deny that Sony knows what it’s doing when it comes to video
games. The first two PlayStation consoles sold a combined 230 million
units worldwide. And Tretton says the company will sell more of the
seven-year-old PlayStation 2 consoles in 2007 than it did in 2006.

There are signs that the beleaguered PS3 may be gaining ground. Sales
of the console doubled during the week of Oct. 29, following a $100
price cut. Exclusive, well-reviewed titles such as “Ratchet and Clank”
and “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” are beginning to trickle out to hungry
consumers – although biggies such as “Final Fantasy XIII” and “Metal Gear Solid 4” still haven’t launched.

I spoke with Tretton before Thanksgiving to
find out what’s next for the PlayStation platform, how long they plan
to support the PlayStation 2 and what he thinks Sony did right — and
wrong — with the PS3 launch.

A recent report says that the price cut on the PS3 has helped sell over
100,000 consoles in America last week. That’s obviously great news for
you guys. Do you think things are starting to turn around a little bit?

While I’m thrilled about the price move and the impact that’s had, what I’m
more excited about is that we really get our first holiday selling
season on the PlayStation 3, and I think that’s lost on a lot of
people. It’s the first time that we have the PlayStation 3 in stock,
that we have a great software library for it and we’ve got very
attractive pricing. So I really feel like we’re able to go into the
holiday season with a fully loaded weapon as compared to last year.


Exclusive titles can help the momentum that you’ve gained here – and they can make or break a system. Tell us about some of the titles you’ve got coming over the next couple of months.

We’ve got 19 exclusives, and again, I think that’s something that’s a pretty
amazing feat in the first year of a platform’s lifecycle. And they’re
not just games that are exclusive for the sake of exclusivity, they’re
games that are built and differentiated for the PlayStation 3 and just
couldn’t be done on any other platform.


Some of the bigger titles, “Metal Gear,” “Final Fantasy,” aren’t due out for a bit longer. That’s got to be a nail-biter for you guys because those are huge titles.

The beauty of this business is that it isn’t all about one day, it isn’t
all about one title, or one month. I think there’s a tremendous amount
of software for the holiday season — 160 games coming out on PS3 alone
for this holiday, on top of the 200 games that have already been out
there, so there’s more than enough great software for consumers to sink
their teeth in for the holidays. And as you pointed out, there’s some
absolute blockbusters coming post-Christmas. So, hopefully, a lot
people go out and buy the hardware and enjoy the great software that’s
available for this holiday — but I think they also have some great
software to look forward to in the first quarter of 2008.


Bloggers,reporters and analysts have not been terribly kind to Sony or the PlayStation 3 this year. Were there missteps on Sony’s part, or do you think that the criticisms have been unfair?

I don’t think there’s any question that there were missteps, but I don’t
think anybody is being honest with you if they say that the first year
of any platform goes perfectly according to plan. I think the biggest
miss for us was the launch, in that we had easily a million consumers
in North America alone that wanted to get their hands on a PlayStation
3 … and we had roughly 200,000 units to take advantage of that demand.
… I think that that was probably the biggest disappointment for the
first year.
The
reason why we don’t end up on window ledges, where other people might
not have the perspective, is we’ve been through this many, many times,
and we’re the only company that’s gone out and had 10-year product
lifecycles and sold over 100 million units — and we haven’t done it
once, we’ve done it twice.

Fair enough. But I think the early quotes that I was seeing prior to launch were things like “this system will sell itself” because of the fans of the previous iterations. This couldn’t have been the year that you’d hoped for.

I think it fell short of what we’d ideally like. But if you put it into
perspective, we’re not taking the safe route. We didn’t take the
PlayStation 2 and add a few bells and whistles to it. … What we’re
trying to do here is … refocus the game industry towards
high-definition gaming, a real state-of-the-art, future-proof machine
for the next decade.

I Can NOT wait for the new Final Fantasy release.

This one?.. I watch this video 3 - 5xz a day