Ex-PlayStation CEO’s Best PS4 Memory Is The E3 Reveal That Mocked Microsoft
Jack Tretton, former CEO for US PlayStation, shared in an interview his most memorable and best PS4 memory during his 10-year tenure which ended in 2014. And that was the E3 presentation that revealed the PlayStation 4 and openly mocked Microsoft for all of its planned, anti-consumer DRM practices.
Why the PS4 reveal is Tretton’s best PS4 memory
Tretton reminisces about the time when Sony jabbed at Microsoft for its highly controversial features for the Xbox One, in an interview on Axios (as revealed by IGN). As a refresher for what was happening at the start of the last generation of consoles, the Xbox One was designed to require an Internet connection, and Microsoft had intentions to make the console unable to play used games unless it was verified by Microsoft itself, the publisher, and/or a “selected partner.”
The Kinect was also a required peripheral that made the Xbox One about a hundred dollars more expensive than the PS4. (It wasn’t until a few years later that the Kinect became optional.)
PlayStation’s E3 conference not only hounded the Xbox One for its price point, but lambasted its unfriendly anti-consumer practices, in a now still infamous 21-second clip called Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video. Simply legendary.
Now that Tretton works with Interactive Gaming Ventures and has contacts with Microsoft, he’s not as eager to savor the moment (at least openly):
I have a lot of friends at Microsoft now and had a lot of friends then, and I wasn’t necessarily looking to do it as their expense. I was just feeling really good about it.
On the flipside of his tenure at PlayStation, Tretton regrets the more than three-week-long outage for PlayStation Network when it was hacked in 2011. He also felt that more should have been done to improve the sales of the PlayStation Vita and the first PlayStation VR headset.
In other news, the Sony-Bungie deal generated more activity on Twitter than the Microsoft-Activision deal, and Square Enix has trademarked Tactics Ogre: Reborn in Japan.
