"PS3 launch will not fail"
Sony has been on the backend of a lot of criticism surrounding the impending launch of the long-awaited PlayStation 3. From the less than impressive number of consoles going to retail on day one (only 400,000 in the USA on recent estimates) to the alleged 'Betamax 2.0' Blu-ray format, many are predicting that the PS3 will be the banana skin that will cause Sony to slip up after dominating the games industry for the last ten years.
However, in an interview with our friends over at Next-Gen.biz, Jack Tretton (executive VP in charge of making the US PS3 launch as smooth as possible) candidly reveals that he too is as concerned with the slow production of the all-important Blu-ray laser diode, the potential Achilles' heel of the PS3. "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".
So should we be cutting Sony some slack? Tretton thinks so, stating that "We've had three very successful platform launches. We've dominated for well over a decade. It's a fair question to ask 'can Sony do it again?' but I'd love to get a little bit more benefit of the doubt". Unsurprisingly he denies that the Japanese giant will fall from grace with consumers. "Obvious!" we hear you cry, but the facts are hard to ignore: even now the PS2 is outselling the Xbox 360, five years after it was outselling its predecessor.
Next-Gen conclude the interview by cheekily asking when does Tretton think the PlayStation 3 will overtake the Xbox 360 in North America.
"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. If there are 125 million television households in North America, we'd like to be in all of them. Right now we've made it into about one out of three so there's two out of three households that we're not in".
November 17 is crunch time for Sony: sales figures for the Holiday season will give an early indication of whether Tretton's optimism is justified or whether Sony will have to resign itself to third place behind Nintendo and Microsoft. Let battle commence!
