During an interview with Axios, the former boss of PlayStation spoke about the brand’s latest laptop, expressing his regrets in particular.
Having already spoken on certain topics, such as investing in new companies or on the question of an Xbox exclusive for Call of Duty, during an interview organized by IGN, Jack Tretton mentioned another point during a last interview granted to Axios. Not to talk about the future this time, but to evoke the past, and above all, express your opinion on the failure of the PSVita.
A machine with limited potential
Launched in 2011and having made less than 15 million buyersSony’s portable console was discontinued in 2019.
For the old boss, Trettonthe machine was sidelined by the company, which saw little point in investing in a product that had not found favor in the eyes of the public, preferring to focus on more valuable technologies.
There were definitely technologies that I thought were good, but just didn’t have the level of support they needed.[…] Being a successful part of a big business sometimes meant having to make sacrifices when other parts of the business weren’t performing as well.
A choice was therefore made, mainly guided by a lack of resources. The company had therefore preferred to take advantage of what worked. And the PS Vita didn’t work. It was then difficult for them to imagine investing more, with a budget that obviously did not allow it.
So, you come up with a new technology to present to industry and consumers. But do you have the marketing budget to get the message across? Do you have the developer support funds to incentivize them to develop games to support this initiative? And sometimes you breed a technology and hope it will be adopted.
As a result, we can imagine very well: the machine had arrived too early. sony couldn’t support her. Something that would have been possible 2017as our main interested party had indicated at the time IGN. However, the time had passed.
Now that I no longer work there, I think internally it was, ‘It’s a great machine, it’s just too late’. The world has shifted to portable devices that aren’t dedicated gaming machines.
