SCEA CEO: ‘SACRIFICING SHORT-TERM CHALLENGES FOR LONG-TERM WINS’

SCEA CEO Jack Tretton has been talking about PS3 development challenges following the price drops, saying the format has “sacrificed short-term challenges for long-term wins”.

Speaking with Newsweek’s Level Up blog, Tretton was asked about the problems developers reportedly face in dealing with PlayStation 3’s large, complex architecture.

“The other thing you need to do, with anybody who follows this industry, is remember that people have selective memories,” he said.

“We’ve heard that our machines are hard to develop for, because the technology is fairly forward thinking. We’ve heard that on the original PlayStation, the PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation 3.

“So we’ve certainly dealt with this before, we’ve heard the same criticisms of the PlayStation 1 and the PlayStation 2, but at the end of the day, the developers got up to speed, the consoles enjoyed an extremely successful long ten-year roadmap.”

“There are other machines that may have been easier to develop for early on, but certainly didn’t have the staying power, based on what happened historically. Certainly that’s our hope and expectation with PlayStation 3. If it’s put in a perspective of ten years, the first eight to ten months is taken relative to getting out the gate quickly and potentially fizzling out in less than ten years. That’s certainly never been our intention. We sacrificed short-term challenges for long-term wins.”