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Tretton admits PlayStation 3 mistakes
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 4th December 2007
Tretton thinks that Sony has got the right idea for the future of gaming consoles, but he would say that.
Speaking to GameDaily Tretton, who has been CEO of SCEA for just over a year now too, said that things could have gone a lot smoother for the PlayStation 3 - especially at launch.
"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." Tretton admitted.
Interestingly though, Tretton said that he wasn't too bothered about the low sales at the moment and that Sony had a long-term plan to see them through.
"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. ... I think if you have that long-term perspective, while I fully admit we'd like to have sold more units, it's hardly cause for panic."
When quizzed about what he thought of Microsoft, Tretton was critical of their decision to offer gamers multiple different SKUs yet not provide free online gaming support.
"Our competition talked about the fact that they want to offer consumers a choice, but then they make it clearly apparent that if you really want to have the full gaming experience, you need to go out and invest a lot more money than you originally thought you were," Tretton said.
Hmm - that could be the most sensible thing I've heard all week, but what do you think? Is Sony going to come out on top as consoles refocus themselves, or do gamers just want more of the same? Let us know what you think in the forums.
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Comments (34)
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b) Buy a 40GB PS3 today - the one on the shelves - and there is no HD cable included. NO HD CABLE. WTF is HD gaming about then?
Also why is he still listed as staff? :p
Obviously I'm thinking of a different PS3.
this is in no way an acknowledgement of mistakes. translated from PR speak it's roughly equivalent to:
"we could have sold a million units at launch if we wanted to, but, yeah we're just too cool for that. MS sucks. buy a ps3"
BUT!
i honestly think the ps3 will gain a lot of momentum in the coming year. it's starting to stretch its legs with games like drakes fortune: uncharted and as a media player is beginning to make a little more sense to me. i may have to make good on my claim that i will buy a ps3 when there are games worth playing on it sometime soon. but hey, that could yet be a while off- after all, i did say gameS. (yeah. i went there. ice burn!)
Yeah, shelling out for that second Wii-mote really hurts the wallet.
ps3 40gb one is easy to get but has no PS1/2 support or card reader less USB ports as well
if i ordered month ago i could of got it at the norm price of £350, guess i have to wait untill after Xmas as prices will go down then
So for now it's Nintendo DS ftw
I'm getting quite tired of the PR bullshit that they're spinning now. Future proof, yeah right, the PS2 was supposedly future proof, everything in one box for a HD experience? Yeah that's why it didn't come with any form of HD video cable in the box. I almost laughed when I read that he thought MS was bad for all it's SKUs.
They're not that bad, there seem to be people who have bad luck with them. I've had far more problems with my PC than I've had with my 360 and all my friends' 360s combined, and with the 360 if it goes wrong, it's just a trip down to the shop to get a replacement.
er, haven't we had that for a number of years on our PC's?
Also, the SKU thing is ridiculous because every console is the same from the beginning, right? You, the informed consumer (and I would hope you'd be informed before spending $399 to $499 on a console), should be able to differentiate on what features matter to you, and if not then you deserve to "be surprised" when you find out there's no memory card, no 2 extra usb slots, or BC).
Sony is pushing BR because they see it as being the format of the future in terms of HD movies/gaming and I have already seen games on 360 such as Mass Effect that could've benefitted from the increase in space over DVD9.
Also, for anyone to consider the online play of PS3 inferior to XBL is just ignorant. Having played multiple games on the PS3 online, I have never lost connection, nor have I noticed lag or longer than normal loading times. And believe me, after seeing my friend spend a total of $100 on XBL (which don't get me wrong, XBL offers more than the PSN in features) I can only sit there and wonder why MS isn't able to do the same thing or discount the price.
except the 20Gb version if wikipedia is to be believed...
Out of interest what does the 360 offer with regards to online that the PS3 doesn't because having had both I couldn't say the PS3 online experience has been lacking at all I certainly haven't missed anything so I find it hard to understand comments like this as I look at live and just think what the fook am I getting for £40 a year that my PS3 and PC don't offer for free?
I think the key point with regards to multiple SKUs is that the PS3 is a consistant platform, developers can uses all functionality like HDD and BR and know that their customers will all benefit, the lack of a HDD on some 360s means that all 360 games have to for the most part be developed with this in mind, which is a restriction.
Yup that was a disgrace but then I am one of the lucky few with a HDTV.
If they wanted to save money then they should have cut the BR drive, that would have made the console significantly cheaper. Sony's story that they put it in there for increased storage space is utter bullshit, they put it in there to force their new format (which isn't any better technically than HD DVD) onto consumers who aren't ready for it, as you say, not many people have an HDTV.
You say mass effect could have been better on a BR disk? No, it wouldn't. You know why? It only takes up 6 gig of space on the disk. That's right, 6 gig, they could have made the game bigger, but the problem had nothing to do with lack of space on the disk, there just wasn't enough money or time to make enough quality content to fill up an entire DVD9, let alone a single layer BR disk.
Are you guys beginning to see the picture now? All this crap about future proofing and massive games is just spin, to con you into lining the pockets of the Sony shareholders. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these down with capitalism types, but the way Sony has treated their customers is appalling. All of Sony's products have been slowly declining in quality compared to the competition for a few years now, but they keep asking for more money for it's products. Sony has thought of themselves as the king of the hill and have been abusing their position to the point where they have alienated many customers and have put their position at risk.
As for live, I'm not talking about the actual online gaming being better, but the service in general. It's much better designed, it was out long before the PS3 was out yet Sony failed to add in basic features to PSN, like not having to quit out of a game to read a message and a poor store system that is just a web site instead of a program designed specifically for the system. Like I said, the PS3 and BR look more and more like a botch job every day.
Here's the main reason why XBL is better than PSN. If you buy a game on the xbox with online features, you will be able to play it online no matter how old it is. If I feel like it, I can pop in one of the first xbox live games on the original xbox and it will still play online. This is because MS owns all the servers dealing with connecting people to someone hosting a game. That is what the £40 per year is for (or if you shop around, £30) and IMO it's money well spent, because I know that one of my favourite yet not very popular games, Shadowrun, will still be playable even though the studio who created it have closed down.
Take for example, the re-botch of MGS3, it was released about a year ago and had great online multiplayer added, but a few months back Konami decided to pull down the servers because it was costing them too much to keep them online. This has happened with many PS2 online games and will very likely happen with PS3 games because although the service is free, you pay a different cost.
I'm not saying the xbox 360 is the perfect console and the PS3 is utter crap, I'm not really into brown nosing MS either. Both consoles have their strengths and weaknesses, both companies have their merits and flaws. PSN is great if you can put up with the annoyances and the chance that you won't be able to play your favourite game online anymore. The PS3 is fantastic value for what you get, it's just a question of whether you want all it has to offer.
I just think the 360 is the more polished of the two, the PS3 just feels like an unfinished product, it feels like a PS2 with extra bits taped on awkwardly, it's a mess of ideas and features that haven't been ironed out even though it took almost a year for it to come out after the 360, it's got some great innovations but also lacks the very basics I'd expect from a box that supposedly gives you the complete experience. MS seemed to build the 360 from the ground up, starting with the most basic features to make sure they were there and working well, whereas Sony seemed to aim for a big skyscraper but forgot to dig the foundations for it, creating a console that is user unfriendly for no foreseeable reason.
I also think Sony is probably one of the worst examples of a company I have ever seen, you can't argue against that because there is no logical argument against it, they're just plain awful.
WOW! You put it so well. The only thing that I would add is how Cell is just like Blu-Ray in the fact that Sony is trying to push another product on the consumer and it has ended up backfiring. People have talked so much about how COD4 plays on the PS3 and why can't every dev make a PS3 game that well, but they fail to acknowledge the fact that IF had to put not only their best devs on the task of making the PS3 version, but more devs than on the 360. There is no reason that a company should have to spend extra money to develop on a platform that has less users. The PS3 is not only hurting Sony, but it is also hurting devs by either making them spend more money and have a lower margin, or they make a crappier product for the PS3 version and in return they get **** for making a bad port. In the end Sony is putting a lose lose on the market and the consumer, they make me regret owning a PS3.
also another interesting point, I have a friend that works at rockstar north in leeds and GTA4 on the 360 is complete and ready to be shipped, with its extra XBL content about halfway through and the PS3 version still does not run anything like the 360 after months with a sony development expert helping.
this is just a prime example of extra development costs, but rockstar are getting paid a pretty penny by sony to delay the release of the 360 version.
Live has had 5 years to mature, the PSN service has been out a year, Live didn't start out like it did now.
There was no push for online abilities for PS2, it was never designed with online community and multiplayer features from the outset whereas the much later released Xbox was, I think there is a bit of brown nosing as you put it there, chastising a machine for abilities it was never advertised to have is harsh. The PS3 is a different kettle of fish and what it offers in its initial launch is pretty comprehensive.
So essentially from what you are telling me you are paying £40 a year so you don't have to quit a game to send a message, obviously I can see how that could be a life and death scenario and something you really wouldn't want to wait or quit out of a game for
I'm actually buying a PS3 primarily to use as a BluRay player; games are a secondary consideration. HD DVD and BluRay are storage formats and as BluRay has the larger capacity i guess that makes it 'technically' better.
i whole heartily agree and dont see me buying another sony product till they sort there **** out
there was more about the benefits of live in that post then not having to quit a game (which imo sounds like a pita)
both are really designed for high-def playback not raw storage (ie genrel backups)
Having owned the X360, the Live environment is more intuitive compared to PSN, but as has been mentioned, it has had more time to mature into what it is. You can have more in the download queue in the background on a PS3 too, I've noticed.
There are a load of for and against's for each console; it's more a personal thing tbh.
Ooh, a Far-Cry knock-off. And a "Media player"... like XBMC then. Or any other recent DVD player with MPEG4 compatibility...
Yes, I'm real impressed.[/sarcasm]
PS3 made mistakes I think its biggest personally was the Blu-Ray drive both in terms of cost and basically I dont want a Blu-Ray drive forced on me because for features which Sony are now playing catch up with HD-DVD is superior plus imo in general theres better films in HD-DVD cause I aint a fan of what Sony film studios in general bring out.
But in the end its a console and consoles live and die by there games and atm I havent seen any exclusive titles which would make me want to buy one but in the future that may change but what I've seen of whats coming there isnt alot that would attract me to be fair only possibly GT5 and MGS4 but I aint paying stupid money on a console for 2 games.
Not saying 360 isnt perfect its far from it but is a useful machine to turn on and have a blast on games with.
BR isn't really any bigger than HD DVD, triple layer HDs are just as big as a dual layer BD but still only cost the same and, more importantly, work on all HD players. It is primarily designed as a media format for HD movies and the like, it will get used as a backup disk but that is not what it was designed for, just like DVD. Sony over designed BD, it's far bigger than they needed it to be. Anyway, using a BD (or HD DVD) is an incredibly bad way to backup data. Firstly, it's an incredibly expensive way to do it, I ccan buy hard drives for less than 1 RW BD, that's completely ignoring the cost of the burner. Secondly, it would take ages to back anything up. The main advantage HD has over BD is price. Sony likes their money a lot so the format, just like UMD and Compact Flash, is very expensive compared to the competition and that price will stay very expensive compared to the competition.
Live had 5 years to mature? So what. Companies study the competition in great detail, hell, the defence company where my gf works had her analysing the workings of a DS even though it's barely related. If something is in direct competition, you take a very good look at all of it's features. It seems Sony just took a look at a feature list of XBL and didn't bother to actually check how it all works, that's why PSN has stupid mistakes like not being able to access messages in game. Remember, details about XBL were available before it was released almost a year before the PS3 hit the shelves. Sony had plenty of time to make sure their service was up to scratch yet still a year after release they haven't addressed some basic feature issues.
In terms of polish, it depends what you're looking at. The hardware failure rates of the 360 is inexcusable and it definitely should have been sorted by now. But in terms of actual features it's very polished, whereas the PS3 is a mishmash of half finished ideas. The, hardware also isn't that polished. They spent ages trying to make the cell able to process graphics as well as the number crunching, but in the end they found they couldn't so jammed in a underpowered GPU last minute, creating a console that is very difficult for developers to work with. My PC has a more powerful GPU and it's two years old.
Lucidity, after being able to sell his PS2 + 1 controller + 2 games online for around $100 and then being able to sell 3 (out of 5) of his BR movies for a little over $30 profit (if you think about it) he essentially got his 60GB PS3 ($499 after taxes, 7 months ago) for approximately $369 since it offers everything the PS2 did along with the BR movies coming free w/ the console purchase. If that's overpriced, then you must not remember that the 360 Premium, when it debuted, cost $499 as well, yet when my friend tried selling his regular Xbox w/ 2 controllers and around 15 games when he first grabbed his 360, he was along going to get around $100 on ebay and even less on craigslist (classifieds), so he decided to keep it since half of the games he had weren't supported in 360's BC (he only played Halo 2 anyway....).
"Load times in the game are frustratingly frequent in certain areas, covered occasionally by ridiculously long elevator rides. This, along with the limited combat map sets on explorable planets, speaks to the limitations of using a single DVD without loading onto the Hard Drive. It's admirable that they wanted to make sure all 360 owners could play, but I find it frustrating that those of us with disk space couldn't make use of it to improve the play experience."
So, maybe, more disk space could've improved the quality of the game, but here's where I get lost: if you can use the HDD for the game, how much space does it usually take up, and is the quality of the game equivilant to the usage of a disc?
But I guess here's the thing: you would probably have to compress most of the game onto the disc and then decompress that data onto the HDD in order to actually utilize more space than what the disc can actually handle natively.
Can anyone explain this further? because I think I'm lost on this method...
Veles we have been through this before. What the Playstation 2 (Not 3, ok, PS2) had for online was not a community. It was decentralized and at developer discression. That was the key difference last generation. You can't sit there and honestly say that PS3 games will be pulled from online on the PLAYSTATION NETWORK, because it happened on the Playstation 2 (which again had no centralized online portal/matchmaking).
Cell was developed by IBM. The Cell has been pushed to more than just consoles. It is also IBM's baby and is proving to be a pretty darn good technological piece of hardware. Why so much want to believe Sony owns the Cell, and is forcing it onto everyone is beyond me. You obviously had no problem with Sony's complicated Emotion Engine. Sony also does not own the Blu-Ray format but co-developed with the Blu-Ray ASSOCIATION. Composed of more than just Sony, Sony, and more Sony. If you need proof Cell isn't just Sony then here. Straight from the horse's mouth. Also note, wasn't IBM involved in the 360's processor and Nintendo's?
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/
http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/awards.html
Sony, IBM, TOSHIBA.
Also you use messaging as a strong point? Ok maybe in a single player game it's cool to send a message once in a while, but how many times are you going to seriously stop in the middle of a TF2 Match, Halo 3, or CoD4 match to send your a buddy a message? I hope that is zero, otherwise you probably end up with more deaths because your using that awesome messaging feature in the middle of an online game. How come Sony can offer Video Chat, Voice chat in-game, Voice-chat outside of the game, Friends Lists, Messaging outside of games, Free Demos (You don't need a Gold account for priority nor wait for 3-5 days if you are Silver), Free Online play, and I have yet to be hit with ads? All for free. I pay for Xbox Live Gold, and I still get a giant Mt. Dew or Doritos advert. If Dorito's and Coke are paying the bill at MS why am I paying as well? So ok, Sony doesn't offer it in-game, I can't remember the last time I accept an invite to Halo 3 while in the middle Call of Duty 4 because why the hell do I wanna switch games just because I got an invite?
Also you seriously think MS ironed out the issues? Is that why they are taking a huge hit in revenue to fix an unknown issue causing the RRod? Is that why they beat around the bush for a whole year pretending it never existed? It's probably why myself included, all of my friends are on either their 2nd or 3rd 360, because MS clearly built it from the ground up and ironed out all the issues.