Interview With Sony's Jack Tretton On Launch Of PS3
Winga
MrSouth Africa Icrontian
Next Generation managed to pin down SCEA’s Jack Tretton, executive VP in charge of Sony’s PS3 launch, long enough for a candid and surprisingly upbeat interview as he talks frankly about PS3’s launch day quotas, Blu-ray diodes, the media, publishers and their rivals.
The interview manages to dispel many negative perceptions and puts a lot of Sony’s accomplishments and strategies into perspective.
These are just a few of his views:
On November 17: “November 17 is just one day….. We think in increments of ten years, not 24 hours. Look back at what the 500,000 PS2s we sold on launch day was to the 41 million we’ve sold since then.
On Blu-Ray: “I’m like everybody else. I’m saying ‘come on! Just build ‘em, man! What’s so complicated?’ But think about what that blue laser diode has to do. It has to read audio CDs, standard DVDs, Blu-ray DVDs, PlayStation 1 games, PlayStation 2 games, and PlayStation 3 games. Six completely different formats that have nothing to do with each other and you’re going to have one device that’s going to read all those.”
On the media: “Bad news sells. All the success that we’ve had is not a sexy story, but any missteps that we’ve had is a story. Sony has gone from number four to number one in high definition television sets this year but people don’t want to write about that. They want to write about a battery recall. Sony is number one at the [cinema] box office, but people just want to write about the costs of the PlayStation 3 production delay.”
On Hard Stats: “PlayStation 2 is outselling Xbox 360 for the year; we’re out-selling Xbox 360 month after month. The same machine that beat the Xbox in 2001 is beating the Xbox 360 in 2006. That’s amazing and that’s big news, but you don’t read a lot about that.
On rivals: “The honest answer is we can’t overtake them until we ship more units than they’ve sold. But we will ultimately accomplish our goals. Our goals aren’t necessarily about overtaking Xbox 360 or overtaking Wii. It’s our goal to maintain our leadership position.
The full interview can be found HERE and makes for some interesting reading.
The interview manages to dispel many negative perceptions and puts a lot of Sony’s accomplishments and strategies into perspective.
These are just a few of his views:
On November 17: “November 17 is just one day….. We think in increments of ten years, not 24 hours. Look back at what the 500,000 PS2s we sold on launch day was to the 41 million we’ve sold since then.
On Blu-Ray: “I’m like everybody else. I’m saying ‘come on! Just build ‘em, man! What’s so complicated?’ But think about what that blue laser diode has to do. It has to read audio CDs, standard DVDs, Blu-ray DVDs, PlayStation 1 games, PlayStation 2 games, and PlayStation 3 games. Six completely different formats that have nothing to do with each other and you’re going to have one device that’s going to read all those.”
On the media: “Bad news sells. All the success that we’ve had is not a sexy story, but any missteps that we’ve had is a story. Sony has gone from number four to number one in high definition television sets this year but people don’t want to write about that. They want to write about a battery recall. Sony is number one at the [cinema] box office, but people just want to write about the costs of the PlayStation 3 production delay.”
On Hard Stats: “PlayStation 2 is outselling Xbox 360 for the year; we’re out-selling Xbox 360 month after month. The same machine that beat the Xbox in 2001 is beating the Xbox 360 in 2006. That’s amazing and that’s big news, but you don’t read a lot about that.
On rivals: “The honest answer is we can’t overtake them until we ship more units than they’ve sold. But we will ultimately accomplish our goals. Our goals aren’t necessarily about overtaking Xbox 360 or overtaking Wii. It’s our goal to maintain our leadership position.
The full interview can be found HERE and makes for some interesting reading.
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