Don't envy Jack Tretton. As the new chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment America, Tretton may have the toughest job in the video game business (with the possible exception of his boss, Kazuo Hirai, who is taking over Sony's global game operation).
In November, after years of relentless hype, Sony introduced its flagship game machine, the PlayStation 3, with a resounding thud. The brainchild of Hirai's predecessor, the engineer Ken Kutaragi, the PlayStation 3 has been hobbled by its lacklustre online service, a dearth of must-have games and, perhaps most important, its stratospheric price.
A result: molasses-like sales for a product that must succeed if Sony is to retain its global leadership in electronics and entertainment. According to the NPD Group, a market research firm, Sony sold just 82,000 PlayStation 3s in the United States last month, fewer than half the number of Xbox 360s sold by Microsoft (174,000) and less than a quarter of the number of Wii consoles sold by Nintendo (360,000).
But this week, Tretton, who was promoted in December, took the vital first steps toward rehabilitating the PS3's tattered reputation. At a three-day presentation for news media and analysts at the company's game studio in San Diego, Sony showed off an impressive lineup of new games and online services in development.
There is a long way to go before the PS3 becomes the home run that Sony so desperately needs it to be, and the system may never reach the mass market without a price cut. But the portfolio on display this week was strong and should cause the first few inklings of concern for Peter Moore, Microsoft's game chief, and his masters in Redmond, Wash.
Almost as important as the substance of the presentations was their tone. In recent years, Sony's game operation has hurt itself badly in the eyes of consumers by overpromising and underdelivering. No longer. Tretton adopted a refreshingly low-key, realistic approach and even tried to tamp down expectations about the PS3's performance.
"We know we face a challenge," he said in an interview. "The long-term goal, and one we will not fully get to by this Christmas, is to get people to understand what the PlayStation 3 can do and all the technology that is under the hood. The short-term goal is to give them proof points in gaming experiences that blow them away. One software title at a time, we want people to say: 'Wow, check that out. I'd like to have that machine.' And that will take some time." Sony has taken a lot of criticism because third-party publishers are making few games exclusively for the PlayStation 3, in contrast with the previous generation, when exclusive PlayStation 2 games like Grand Theft Auto III were the system's main sales drivers.
Sony's response this week was to say that it has fired up its own internal-development engine, which will deliver 15 PS3-exclusive games this year.
The top games scheduled for release this year include:
Heavenly Sword, an Asian-theme fracas reminiscent of Sony's hit God of War franchise, with prettier graphics.
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, a ridiculously sumptuous, family-friendly romp that may be the first game to truly deliver the long-sought "You are playing a Pixar movie" experience.
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, an Indiana Jones-like game that looks as if it just crawled out of the jungle. (That's a good thing.)
Socom: Confrontation, the latest iteration of Sony's Navy SEALs game, which may be a must-play for tactical shooter fans.
-- Warhawk, a multi-player, near-future combat game that should stack up well against Electronic Arts' successful Battlefield franchise.
Those games looked cool, but none of them are quite as fun as LittleBigPlanet, a whimsical, stylish, innovative game scheduled for release in 2008 that brought the house down when it was first shown in San Francisco earlier this year.
In LittleBigPlanet, players control little characters that seem to be made of beanbags as they traverse levels full of physics-based puzzles. It can sound like a banal diversion for children, but the characters have so much personality, and the environments are so rich, that LittleBigPlanet could become a top guilty pleasure for adult gamers.
But the most important product here was not a game.
When Kutaragi was designing the PlayStation 3, his biggest failing was that he (unlike Microsoft) did not seem to understand the importance of a robust and compelling online service to the 21st-century gamer. The version of the PlayStation Network that made its debut alongside the PS3 felt clunky, tacked-on and a far cry from Microsoft's sleek, powerful Xbox Live service.
Sony, however, has an ace in the hole, called Home, a three-dimensional virtual world that will be available later this year to online PS3 users. Home functions as a meeting space and customizable virtual identity, sort of like Second Life meets MySpace.
Users create their own avatars and their own apartments, which they can decorate and use to display trophies collected from various games. They will also be able to invite friends into their apartments and then stream video and audio that they have stored on their PS3's hard drive.
Home made a deep impression because it appears set to deliver the sort of social interaction and networking that Microsoft has heretofore cornered with Xbox Live.
Home has the chance to give Sony its first great online product since the introduction of EverQuest, the granddaddy of online role-playing games. At the moment, Home looks good. And at the moment, the PlayStation 3's prospects appear a bit less dire than they did last week.
