Sony Fires Back

SCEA executive VP, Jack Tretton, shares the party line on PS3 supplies, Blu-Ray, retailers, publishers and rivals

by Colin Campbell

The desks at Sony HQ are mostly unoccupied. Their usual inhabitants have gone to prepare the way for PlayStation 3’s arrival; analysts to be courted, journalists to be persuaded, retailers to be assured, publishers to be mollified. Sony people are whizzing around the country.

Those few left in the humming Foster City office are also at Hardware Launch Defcon 1, a state of heightened being that transcends mortal needs such as rest and relaxation. For most SCEA people, this launch will count as a shining moment in their careers. It will take a Nuclear Apocalypse, the Rapture or PS3’s Abject Failure for this event to be rendered irrelevant as far as their resumes go. If you’re in the business of interactive entertainment, this here is the Big One; the one you don’t neglect to mention at job interviews.

Jack Tretton is in his office handling calls at a Cell processing rate. He manages to spare 27.4 minutes of fast-talk.

Tretton is executive VP in charge of the launch. If he should ever require the use of a resume, his will catalogue Sony’s journey from PS1 to PS3 with PSP in the mix.

On November 17

What he’s learned about launches is that Day One is just One Day. “November 17 is just one day on the very, very long road that is the platform life cycle. We think in increments of ten years, not 24 hours. Look back at what the 500,000 PS2s we sold on launch day was to the 41 million we’ve sold since then.  Six years later, it’s not a big thing.”

But at this remove from the launch, interest is inevitably hanging on Sony’s ability to handle massive demand; a need that cannot possibly be satisfied. The story isn’t the shortages so much as Sony’s ability to handle their consequences; good and ill. The days when shortage-stories were shorthand for mere demand are gone. Now they are about corporate competence in manufacturing, in calling the market, and in handling the media.

He says newsreels of miserable, huddled consumers waiting forlornly on sidewalks are “very damaging”. “What people can’t deal with is bad information,” he says. "When we communicate that number [of units] we’ll deliver against it. We’re going to try to accommodate as many people as possible. We’re going to avoid creating false expectations. Retailers will know their quantities well in advance of opening their doors. They’ll say, ‘this is the quantity we have to work with, we’re going to distribute numbers, if you’ve got one of those numbers, you’re good to go.  If you didn’t, I’m sorry, we’ll do the best we can to have subsequent supply.’

“So you don’t have somebody who waits hours upon hours only to find out that they aren’t getting one.”

On that 400,000 figure

For Tretton, the task at hand isn’t just about getting as close as possible to that previously suggested 400,000-unit figure, but also in backing up the launch with new supplies, prior to the Holidays. “The first question out of a retailer’s mouth is ‘when are you going to have more?’ We will provide subsequent information that says, ‘here’s when the next shipment is coming and here’s what you can expect.’ So they can give consumers accurate information.”