This guy made a quick video that he feels summed up the Sony press conference in about a minute. You have Jack Tretton speaking about his products with a couple of surprises. It is a subtle video, but pretty funny. Check it out and let us know if he hit the mark?
Hot off the heels of Phil Harrison’s scheduled departure comes news of three new big shots coming to Sony Computer Entertainment America. Robert Dyer will take the position Senior Vice President of Publisher Relations, Ian Jackson is the new Vice President of Sales, and Sally Buchanan steps into being the Vice President of Human Resources.
“Rob Dyer, Ian Jackson and Sally Buchanan’s proven records of strategic leadership and innovation, combined with their extensive industry experience re-enforce their new roles as a great fit for our organization,” said Jack Tretton, president and CEO, SCEA. “These three appointments augment an already strong executive staff at SCEA and provide the company with additional leadership to focus on key relationships with some of the most important constituencies, our publishing partners, retail community, and internal employees, as we continue to build on the momentum generated in early 2008 by the PlayStation family of products.”
The new leadership at SCEA will begin their roles in March and April. Everyone will be reporting directly to Jack Tretton, current head honcho of SCEA. Who knows this how will effect the company’s strategies in the the marketplace. Only time will tell.
Jack Tretton announced today that the gimped 40GB PS3 will be making it’s way to America on November 2nd for a cool $400. The differences between the stripped down console and it’s big bothers are a 40GB hard drive, two USB ports instead of four, no card readers, and no backwards compatibility.
Along with the new console, Sony announced a price drop for the 80GB PS3 to $500 in the US.
“We’re choosing to focus on the PlayStation 2 consumer with the PlayStation 2, which remains incredibly relevant, and focus on the PlayStation 3 consumer with the new 40-gigabyte model and the great software coming out,” Tretton said.
“Backward compatibility is a nice secondary consideration, but it’s far from the number-one priority.”
I’m still not a happy camper about Sony ditching BC with the 40GB console. For me, it’s a big downer. At least now with good PS2 games still coming out. What do you think? Will the 40GB PS3 succeed in the US?
At E3, Game Head got a chance to talk to Jack Tretton about losing GTA4 as a PlayStation exclusive. In the interview, Jack revealed that Rockstar would be developing a new, exclusive franchise for the PS3 after Grand Theft Auto 4. Some are speculating this will be LA Noire, but Jack somewhat shot that down.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see what comes of this new exclusive franchise. I hope it’s not more ping pong.
There is a little phrase called “passing the buck” we use here in the greater New York area and this is what Jack Tretton of SCEA is doing. He states, correctly I might add, that Sony has no power or control of what third party gaming companies are putting out and they need to be better to enhance the power of the PS3. Here are some quotes from an interview courtesy of gamerindustrybiz:
“If we have to drive the message on our platform with the games that do that…whether they are first party or third…those are the games we are going to focus on and those are the games the consumers are going to make their purchase decisions on,”
“The message I want to send is, we can’t control what the third parties do,” he explained. “We want to encourage them as much as possible, we want to support them as much as possible…to your point, we want to give them the tools.
“We’re a company that does about 20 plus per cent of our business on first party, so believe me, I don’t want to send the message that we don’t need the third partes. We want to encourage them to maximize their development potential on our platform.
Take it anyway you want, but it seems that Sony is not all too happy with the quality of games that third parties are releasing and its a subtle way of saying, if it sucks, we wont buy it. I, for one, agree with his sentiments. What do you guys think?
