Thursday, November 16, 2006

Another Edition of Sony WTF?

This could be a regular feature, really.

A bunch of you guys sent me this link--an interview SCEA executive Vice President Jack Tretton. Here are some outstanding excerpts:
Wired: Do you have a response for people experiencing backwards compatibility issues and/or television upscaling problems?
Tretton: I would like my car to fly and make me breakfast, but that's an unrealistic expectation. We've reported problems on only 200 of the 8000 PlayStation 1 and 2 games. I would challenge the average consumer to say that there are significant problems with any of the games in their library.


I would like my car to fly and make me breakfast?

This, in a nutshell, is Sony's problem: they've all been acting like arrogant dicks.

Hey Jack, do you not remember Crazy Ken announcing on March 15th that not only would the PS3 be 100% backwards-compatible, but that it would upconvert all legacy games into HD? Was it an unrealistic expectation to expect Sony to live up to their promises?

Plus, what he's saying is an excellent example of misdirection. Look carefully at what he said--"We've reported problems on only 200 of the 8000 PlayStation 1 and 2 games." Right, there are "reported problems" on 200 games. Here's the misdirection, though--how many have been tested? Because I would guarantee it's not all 8,000. In truth, he has no idea how many games are having compatibility issues, and no one at Sony will until people start reporting them. So he reports a "hard" number, but it's part of a "soft" number to make the percentages look better.

Misdirection. At a seventh grader level.

Here's the other part that really burned me up.
On upscaling issues: This machine looks phenomenal on the cheapest color TV you ever bought. So I don't want people to think they'll be looking at stick figures [if you don’t have a 1080p display].

Is that answering the question or anything? Because I sure don't see an answer in there anywhere. No, they won't be looking at stick figures, Jackie, but if their set supports a 1080i signal and doesn't support a 720p signal, 720p native games will be displayed in 480p.

So $599 isn't enough to pay to expect Sony to get that right?

Sony's entire future rests on the strength of the Playstation brand, because every Sony executive who's opened his mouth in the last nine months has acted like a complete fool. Their execution has been incredibly poor, they've made major strategic and tactical errors, and incredibly, they've managed to piss off almost everyone in the process.

So we're about to see if a brand name can overcome complete and utter incompetence. It should be interesting.

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