Briefly thinking back to past Sony press conferences, it's hard not to miss Jack Tretton and his cheeky little smile. The former president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, Tretton left the company in 2014, but that hasn't stopped him from talking about the PlayStation 3 and its troubled launch in a new interview with IGN.
Indeed, Sony's last-gen console got off to a really tough start, launching roughly a year after the Xbox 360 with its infamous $599 price tag. According to Tretton, it was "quite possibly the most difficult launch scenario you could ever imagine". He continues: "knowing that Xbox 360 was already out, that you were much more expensive than you wanted to be, that you had much less inventory than you wanted to have at launch, and that it was going to be a learning curve in terms of software development and manufacturing efficiency [...] a lot of real challenges there at that launch."
In a rather juicy quote, Tretton likens his then newly appointed role as CEO to "being made the captain of the Titanic just before it hit the iceberg". Ouch.
Still, rough patches are pretty much an inevitability when you're a company like Sony, and it's safe to say that the firm has learned a lot from the PS3's shaky beginnings, setting the pace of this current generation of consoles with the PS4.
Can you remember the PS3's launch? Were you watching when Kaz Hirai belted out the 599 US dollars line? Think back to the bad old days in the comments section below.
[source youtube.com, via gamespot.com]
Comments 24
we all know what went wrong Sony were high on the success of the PS2 and thought that they would get the sales no matter what they did or how much it cost
MS did the same thing with the XBO and so did Nintendo with the Wii U but they learnt that even though we are gamers we aint going to taken for a ride
I must be the only one not missing Tretton. Not that Layden is any better in charisma terms, of course.
I liked him, like Layden too. Liked the PS3 when I got it in 2008 and think Sony did a good job of ending last gen on (what I perceive to be) a fairly even footing with the 360.
Maybe I'm just a blinkered Sony fanboy, though.
Ah I remember the the e3 press conference, it was a disaster. Ps3 to expensive, no games I really wanted to play , and the yellow light. For those reasons I didn't get a ps3 for a long time. But It got better overtime, more games, better memory and the best marketing I have ever seen (Kevin Butler)
Ahh I remember that time, the ps3 is just too expensive for me at $600 although bluray player at the time can cost $1000, so I bought xbox 360 instead. I finally bought ps3 when the $300 slim version is out with metal gear solid 4 and valkyria chronicles.
I forked out for a PS3 at launch. I only had one game to start with - Motorstorm. I was over the moon. At the time I was just so excited, I was oblivious to most of the bad press regarding the PS3's launch. Looking back, though, it's easy to see how hard it must have been for Sony, and they had a real battle on their hands to keep up with the 360.
But they managed to do it! It's actually pretty crazy how the PS3 turned out by the end of the generation compared to where it started. Good work, Tretton.
Price was high. I got Slim in 2010/11 for decent price. 600 is too much. I think Sony is so afraid of Selling again high priced hw, that rather do compromises and result is pro for 400. And thats fact lot of people should consider. Its not about Sony isnt able to make powerful hardware but it costs something. So Im glad for vr for 400 and pro for 400 thanks to lesson with ps3 .
@kyleforrester87 Nah you are bang on. The PS3 ended very strong and imo ended stronger than the 360.
@Grawlog I think MS got the ball rolling when they dropped Kinect and $100 off the price. Then another $50 here and another $50 there. Nobody is talking about Kinect with the 3 X1S models, it's all about the ultra blu-ray drive Sony left out. X1 may near the end catch up to PS4 sales like PS3 finally caught up to Xbox 360 sales. It won't catch it, 5 million Japan sales will see to that, but I think it's recovering.
Nintendo is still charging $300 for WiiU and won't give us a clue what NX is, hard to predict that one, but it's a long climb up the mountain.
Lol loved the Titanic quote as I was thinking the same thing. Their ego was so inflated that they thought they were unsinkable, yet they didn't see the iceberg that was MS.
I remember wanting one but that price killed it for me, then all saw all the third party games I wanted to play were on 360 so I went with them.
PlayStation 2 had a lot of games ok many many games would you go to a console that was expensive with few games...
I waited then waited then i bought an Xbox360 and waited eventually picking a fat 320gig ps3 for 80 quid 2 years after P.S.4 came out i waited for a 1 terra and I love P.S.4
I wanted it, but never bought the console until the Motorstorm bundle came out. Loved it, but the price was still high around that time, and if I remembered, the price was the main reason why I wasn't a first-come buyer of it. I had the Wii and the original consoles before it, so there wasn't a need to run out and buy it just yet...especially when there wasn't many games out for it yet...after the announcement that Hot Shots Golf Out Of Bounds was out in a few months, I picked it up, which soon followed Buzz and Sing Star, and never looked back at the price. Sure, I ended up with an 80GB original console (that played PS1 and PS2) and had to upgrade the Hard Drive mighty quickly, but I love the system and still do to this day. Playstation 4 was a day one buy for me!!! Playstation 3 is what really made me become a Sony fan, as I wasn't a fan of the first Playstation and I really never got into the PS2 as much as the Gamecube, but PS3 won me over and PS4 is keeping me going!
Still though, the reason the PS3 hurt at launch, was the price (even though I know that Bluray was still new and expensive at that time), but it was definitely the price. If it was the same price as the 360, and had a great launch library of games at the time (especially if Uncharted, Last Of Us or Ratchet And Clank launched along side it), it would've have done far better at launch...glad to know that it did better throughout the years!
I watched in horror because I knew as a child there was no way I was getting one for Christmas but even if I was grown and had the money at the time I would not have spent that much on the console.
I can see the value in the system at the time but it was still too high. I also recall them showing how 2 HDTVs could be hooked up at the same time and display the game (they showed of Gran Turismo I think) you were playing.
HDTVs at the time were extremely expensive and I just thought to myself who are they trying to sell this thing to..... the monopoly man.
I also remember people getting shot over this thing at launch. Now you can walk in anywhere and walk out with a PS3 for $150...smh
Got one day 2 because a friend of a friend bought about 10 of them, hoping for a 360 like shortage and stupidly inflated price on ebay. Needless to say that that didn't happen, couldn't get rid of the stock and so got it for £400 which I paid for over 2 months!
bought one just before christmas 2007. got a deal with CoD4, Tools of Destruction and Uncharted for £350. i'd been mostly a PC gamer til then, but eventually got fed up of having to upgrade my graphics card almost every year, and always running into random driver issues and program incompatibilities. i had the fat PS3 with the backwards compatibility, but the graphics card fried on it after 9 months, and whatever service game used on their extended warrantly, they declared it beyond economic repair, and it was replaced with the newer 80gb model without the backwards compatibility. i still have that now, in perfect working order (with 640gb hdd).
Sony was successful before the PS2 with the first console ever to sell over a million consoles the PlayStation, the rest is history. I remember getting the PS3 with Motorstorm also at launch, it was a amazing looking game back then.
This was just a small part of a 40-minute interview that's definitely worth a listen to anybody who has the free time. Ryan McCaffrey is one of the few journalists working at a mainstream outlet who actually does a decent job.
As for the PS3 launch, it was just a matter of poor timing. The PS3 was a great forward-thinking console that as alluded to in the interview had many features that were eventually appreciated but given the technology there was no way Sony could price it accordingly. You couple that with the 360 providing HD gaming at $200 less and really starting to hit its stride in 2006 and Nintendo disrupting the market with the Wii in similar fashion to how it had done so decades earlier with the NES and it's no surprise PS3 struggled the way it did early on. Fortunately Sony and its first party outfits stuck with it, third parties eventually got to grips with the hardware and by the end, the PS3 was the best console of last gen. Certainly it was the best from the release of Killzone 2 in 2009 until the end of the generation.
@FullbringIchigo Technically Nintendo never had that problem, but at the same time there the only one who sacrificed power for a controller..................
My first thought when hearing the launch prices was that the PS3 must be a really great console. The $600 price is much higher than the PS2 . More than the xbox 360, but with more features that make the PS3 worth the cost.
When released in 2006 the higher cost was more the topic than the features like blue-ray, hdmi out, built in wifi, rechargeable controllers, an internet browser, and backward play of PS2 and PS1 game discs, All features the cheaper 360 did not have at launch. Backward play varied throughout the PS3 gen and the 360 had backward play added for original xbox games.
The higher price and few games was viewed as not the way to play catch-up to the 360 released one year earlier. However we know the rest of the story now. About how the orirginal 360's had high failure rates and how the PS3 slim released in 2009 for $300 ushered in a successful second half of the PS3 gen.
More than any price controversy the biggest issue with the PS3 turned out to be the hardware of divided ram and the cell processor that often provided issues for porting games to. Multiplat games therefore often looked better and had better frame rates on the 360.
@FullbringIchigo thats facts
I just love the things they came out with. Like how people will get a second job or work extra hours. Quotes like that doomed them but well done to Sony for getting back on track and doing so well this time.
It seems Sony aren't alone. All companies screw up royally on their third machine. Atari, Sega, Nintendo, Sony and of course Microsoft did the exact same thing.
@FullbringIchigo The Xbox was a joke for me switching up to 4 DVD`s. And what did they say we will never use a Bluray disk.....
He also made an interesting comment about the vita.
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