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Sony's Ken Kutaragi To Step Down
Joystiq reports that Chairman and group CEO for Sony Computer Entertainment Ken Kutaragi is retiring as of June 19th. The Sony reshuffling of executives late last year left Mr. Kutaragi out of the PS3 nitty-gritty, and one could imagine led to his decision to leave the organization. From SCEI's official statement: "[Mr. Kutaragi] stated that, in the six months since the appointment of Kazuo Hirai as President in December, the new generation of management, led by Mr. Hirai, has continued to develop. With the March introduction of PS3 in Europe completing the successful launch of PS3 worldwide, Mr. Kutaragi has identified SCE's Annual Shareholders' meeting in June as the ideal timing to pass on the torch to the new generation of management. Mr. Kutaragi will now apply his extensive technological knowledge and leadership skills to take on new challenges beyond the world of PlayStation."
Is he going to get a Gunpei window seat, or is he going to have any real power?
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Oh, I don't think he decided anything. This is how executives get pushed out while allowing them to save face.
Anyway, thanks to Ken, for one of the most entertaining business dramas I've seen since 3dfx.
Will the video footage of him comitting ritual suicide be available on UMD?
Someone must have hitten him in his weak point for MASSIVE DAMAGE!.
...Sorry, I had to do it.
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It's a bit of a coincidence for him to leave just after the PS3 is confirmed as a total failure (full international release and still way behind the competitors). Clearly shows that inside Sony they're well aware they have a serious problem, and the hilarious press releases about the PS3 are a miserable attempt at damage control, and not simply corporate arrogance.
Sounds to me he picked the shareholders meeting to announce his retirement so that the shareholders don't have to announce it for him.
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I have a PS3, and as a game system, I think it sucks. Over 50% of the games currently out for the system are made by SEGA, and each and every one of them I hate.
In fact, I find it funny that the only highly rated games for the system are ports from successful PC games. The reviews are high, but they all say the same thing - "If you played this on PC, there's nothing new here." So why shell out $60 more for something I played 1-2 years ago?
I'll buy GT5, White Knight (if we see it here), FF XIII... that's about it. Those are all over 12 months away still, and I knew that when I bought the system.
In the meantime, I have it set up to run Linux, and it serves as a media PC for me.
All the PS3 needs is games, and it needs good ones, not the garbage freely flowing from SEGA studios.
There was less competition in the prior generation. Dreamcast was killed at least in part by Sony's fraudulent claims of performance. (Not only could the system actually not push as many triangles as they originally claimed, but it CERTAINLY couldn't push that many triangles in anything but a demo.) Gamecube was still just considered a "kiddie" system by the masses. Xbox was late to the table, and Microsoft was just trying to figure out how the console gaming market worked.
This time, Sony is up against a determined Microsoft, who was first to market in the generation, and a seriously damned strong Nintendo, which has single-handedly revolutionized gaming. I shit you not man, they are THE force in bringing gaming to the masses. The GBA SP was a big first step in that direction, being the first handheld game system that a) could comfortably fit in almost anyone's pocket and b) didn't look like a fisher-price toy.
In addition, this is Sony's second generation of alienating developers. The Playstation succeeded in large part because it was the easiest console on which you could get good results. N64 had no optical drive, so that took it out of the running for many publishers right there. Saturn was $100 more than the Playstation, and had two processors with no OS to help you use them or any other hardware, so it was the most difficult to utilize in its generation. Sony won that fight more or less by default. But the PS2 was the most complicated game console platform (from a programming standpoint) that had ever been released! The main CPU was made of two other 64 bit cores glued together with a 64 bit processor with some 128 bit instructions, the two cores behind the glue logic meanwhile being asymmetrical. But the PS3 is even harder to fully utilize than the PS2, with its eight total [usable] processors, not counting the graphics core.
Meanwhile, this is Microsoft's second generation of attracting developers with easy-to-use development tools, and Nintendo has never made a console that was especially complicated from an architectural standpoint - every system so far has had one CPU, one graphics chip (whether 2d or 3d) and so on. The systems are easy to develop games for and that is a huge selling point to the developers. And the only manufacturer not working to make work easier for developers is Sony.
The result of this is that the PS3 games cost more to make because of the added complexity. This will not only make them more expensive but piss off developers and bias them against projects on the PS3. They'll still support the platform if they're told to (and paid to) but I think we can expect the PS3 versions of non-exclusive titles to be the least impressive in many cases even though the PS3 has the most raw power, both because it's harder to utilize the hardware to the fullest, and because the developers will simply not want to work on it as much.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'll just get branded fan-boy for this, but I don't think the PSP is any better looking than the SP or DS... Only difference is the PSP seems to have a slightly nicer screen and is black.
As far as the new consoles go.. I think I'll only be getting a Wii (when I can find one..) I can't stand the evil empire, and the PS3 is just.. well, too expensive. That leaves Nintendo.
Say what youy want about his gaffs with the PS3, but keep in mind that the primary factor that ruined the PS3 was the insistence that it include a Blu-Ray drive, most likely driven from the Media-oriented Mr. Stringer. Kutaragi was forced to support a product that was flawed because its development was driven (and delayed) by motivations that had nothing to do with gamers, and everything to do with promoting a new DRM scheme.
Remove the 6 month delay necessitated by adding the Blu-Ray drive, as well as the expense, and the obvious maneuver to push Blu-Ray into homes using fanboys and loyal customers, and it's an entirely different story... Sony still has a problem with the gaming experience, and the whole fiasco over feedback controllers, but those become minor issues. In making DRM so central to the PS3's strategy (or should I say, making the PS3 central to Sony's invasive DRM strategy) after Sony's horrible anti-consumer behavior primarily in its media divisions has made many of its loyal customers angry and resolute in not supporting the company. It's made them consciously avoid all things "Sony" - from CDs that may install rootkits that open security holes on your PCs, to movies that take extreme measures to eliminate fair use of customers to back up their own movies (while pirates release those same movies on the net days or even weeks before they are released for retail). Until Blu-Ray is added to the mix, one can simply argue that the PS3 is an island in the sea of things wrong with Sony as a corporate citizen; with Blu-Ray, however, the PS3 becomes yet another pawn - a cynical move in an agenda to control consumers' rights and increase control in media markets.
So, here we are, months after the PS3's dismal launch, and we all can agree, game quality issue aside, the PS3 would have sold much better without the Blu-Ray drive inflating the price. All of Ken's crazy words would have merely been a sidenote in a frenzied battle of consoles. It's launch would have occurred 6 months BEFORE the Wii, striking quicker and likely deeper into the market that the Wii got exposure to on equal terms with last holiday season. Can you blame Kutaragi for it all? Would he have agreed to include the Blu-Ray drive if he had not gotten incredible pressure from higher up?
It's no coincidence that Sony's leaders are media people - their media division makes money by the tankerful. What nobody seems to grasp is that those profits are not thanks to those same executives that wield so much political power within Sony's corporate arena.... media sells these days, even crap media. The world is hungry for movies and music - I suppose you could say they at least didn't make so many boneheaded moves that they dragged the company down, but even that's not entirely true - yet they hold the power, and likely forced Blu-Ray upon the PS3.
Ah well... they sweep Ken out the door and play it up as a "shake up" between the lines, it looks like SCE is making moves to improve the PS3 situation, but in reality, it does nothing to solve the underlying problem of a system tied down with a 50-ton boat anchor. It will satisfy the stockholders, many of whome have no idea when it comes to gaming consoles, only that that division has lost money for the last 5 years and is losing money at a rapid pace (even though others might realize it's a strategy to lose money on every PS3 sold).