Former SCEA President Jack Tretton Discusses PlayStation’s Highs And Lows

In an interview with IGN, former President & CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America Jack Tretton discusses the challenges and successes of PlayStation during his 19 years at the company.

Tretton discusses the success of PlayStation hardware, the PlayStation 3’s launch, the PlayStation Network hack, the PlayStation Vita’s struggles, lessons learned from the PlayStation 3 for PlayStation 4, the relationship between Sony’s American and Japanese branches, Nintendo and Microsoft’s consoles, the video game industry and his time at Activision.

When talking about the success of PlayStation 2 Tretton says “It was really ushering in the multimedia era, where PlayStation 2 did as much for the transition to VHS to DVD as it did for gaming.”

“I think the hack and the launch of PlayStation 3 were probably the two toughest periods over my time there. There was no winners in that scenario, it was really bad for the consumers, it was really bad for the company.” Tretton says when discussing the PlayStation Network outage.