Sony aims for comeback win with PS3

Top video-game executive says console contest is still in the early innings
By Kristin Kalning

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

The PlayStation 3 launch 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.