Sony: ‘Our development platform has staying power’

Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton has been discussing developers’ trials and tribulations with the PS3 following news that the price of the machine has been dropped in the US, saying the fomat holder has "sacrificed short-term challenges for long-term wins".

Speaking with Newsweek’s Level Up blog, Tretton was asked about the problems developers reportedly have 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."

He added: "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."