It has long been said that one of Sony’s biggest selling points is it’s vast variety of quality games they offer. Sony’s exclusives range from straight up shooter with Killzone 2, to casual family fun with Buzz!, to high-octane sports with MLB 09: The Show, and everything in between.
So it’s no surprise to hear that SCEA’s top dog, Jack Tretton agrees with this mantra.
Jack Tretton is partly to thank for the companies decades of diverstiy, as he’s been with SCEA since it’s inception in 1995. Back then he was director of sales, but now he is discussing how units sold isn’t a as large a merit as a solid lineup of games and features.
Tretton, while speaking to Fast Company, feels that the variety that Sony is known for is paramount to sales:
We want the platform to be successful, we want to be profitable. But it is getting harder to measure that. And when you get down to a game like The Last Guardian, you can’t just look at the number of units it sold versus it’s development cost; it’s what did you do to drive our message of diversity.
Jack doesn’t stop there, as the message translates over to the capabilities of the PlayStation 3:
We could’ve come out with a PlayStation 2.5 for $299 or less, and in the first two or three years it would sell extremely well. But there would be a point where people would be going, “I am not really seeing the incremental leap.” We feel that we’re sacrificing the short term to pay dividends in the long term.
PlayStation 3 owners know this diversity well. It’s in our games and it’s in our console’s capabilities and functionality, be it as a Blu-Ray player and a perfect pairing with your HDTV, or strictly as a gaming console. PlayStation 3 has it all, and it’s growing every day.
[Source]
