Q&A with Sony U.S. games chief Jack Tretton

[BBlue]

Q: I want to ask you a little bit about — you guys are — you mentioned this right at the start — you’re looking at the 10-year product lifecycle and having a product that’s relevant over 10 years. One of the ways that you guys tried to do that was by building in the Blu-Ray disc format into the PlayStation 3. Like Dean said, there are many people who are ready to call this for the Wii, for this generation of consoles, there are also people out there now that are getting ready to call this battle between the HD-DVD and Blu-ray for HD-DVD. Is that beginning to look to you guys like a mistake that you went with Blu-ray instead of HD-DVD, given the costs and what market share has done of late?

A: I guess you might be seeing some numbers that I haven’t seen, but everything I’ve seen has Blu-ray outselling HD-DVD handily. And I think the other thing that’s lost on people getting into an HD-DVD-Blu-ray battle, is that Blu-ray is a great format for movie playback, but for the PlayStation 3, I think the most important thing is the Blu-ray drive for gaming and the ability to have 50-gigs of storage on a PlayStation 3 game as compared to 9 from our competition at max. And if you look at games like “Ratchet & Clank,” “Resistance” and some of the key games that we’ve shipped, you’re talking about games of upward of 24-gigs. And I think again, you can’t ignore history. When we first came out with the CD format as compared to cartridge, the storage capacity was incredible, and what you could do with gaming was incredible, and people said, “that’s amazing, it’s never going to get any better than that.” And then DVD came out, and initially people said, “Why do you really need DVD? CD has plenty of storage capability,” and five years later, 95 percent of the content was on DVD. I think you’ll see the same thing with Blu-ray. And people say, “Oh, 9 gigs is enough. You just put two, three, four discs in a box.” That obviously isn’t going to fly long term.

Q: Well, you guys pitched this as both, that it was not just — that the PlayStation 3, that having the Blu-ray in there was not just for the games, but also for — that this was going to be the Trojan horse to win the Blu-ray DVD battle, which Sony has placed a lot of bets on. Just because it’s in the PlayStation 3 doesn’t mean it’s going to win.

A: OK, well I’ll give you a couple of statistics that has me fairly confident: 160 CE companies backing Blu-ray, seven of the eight major studios backing Blu-ray, you’ve got Blu-ray content outselling HD-DVD two-to-one, and by an even greater margin worldwide. You’ve got a machine in the PlayStation 3 that’s got over 2 million units in North America that plays Blu-ray movies, and those to me are all positive signs. Now if you want to rattle off the HD-DVD statistics that are more superior to those and are more advantageous, I’m more than happy to listen.

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