Former PlayStation boss reveals his best and worst moments at Sony’s E3
Former US PlayStation CEO Jack Tretton has certainly had his share of ups and downs at Sony. While its tenure has been filled with more ups than downs, PlayStation certainly had its tough times between 1995 and 2014.
In a new interview with Axios, Tretton shared some of those moments, reminiscing about some of his best and worst moments from E3. They include the reveal of the PlayStation 4, which managed to deliver a devastating blow to Xbox One hopes before the gen even started.
The reveal included the “official PlayStation game used instructional video”, which mocked Microsoft’s DRM policy of restricting the games used (which the company eventually reversed). The PlayStation 4 also managed to undercut the Xbox One by around $100 due to the Xbox console including the Kinect.
“I have a lot of friends at Microsoft now and I had a lot of friends back then, and I wasn’t necessarily looking to do it at their expense. I felt really good about it,” Tretton said. .
But times weren’t always so good for Tretton. In 2011, PlayStation suffered a 23-day PlayStation Network outage due to a hack that exposed some 77 million accounts. PlayStation suffered heavy criticism for the event and ended up giving away 30 days of free PSN to all members, among other makeshift merchandise.
Tretton opened E3 by apologizing for the event. “While that’s necessarily a difficult message to convey, I thought it had to be said.”
Elsewhere, Tretton reflected on some of his other projects at Sony, which he said were “a bit orphaned” and didn’t get the necessary attention they needed. He cited the poor sales of PlayStation Vita and the slow adoption of PlayStation’s virtual reality headset as examples of such projects.
“There were definitely technologies that I thought were good but just didn’t have the level of support they needed,” he explains, explaining that some of them didn’t have the marketing budget they needed. they needed and other supports.