Jun 13, 2009

Jack Tretton Doesn’t Like Leaks

Categories: Sony

Those of you who sat through Sony’s E3 conference will recognise Jack as “being the guy who did all the talking”, of course he’s more than that. He’s Sony’s US president and as such he’s privy to a whole host of top secret information that we, as gamer’s only know about when he says so. This doesn’t always go according to plan and some of you might remember that the PSP Go found it’s way onto the internet, stealing Jack’s Thunder.

During the conference Jack was gracious enough to make a couple of jokes about it, which got him a few laughs and he went on to produce a top notch keynote regardless of leaks. The other day he spoke to CNBC about the frustrations of keeping secrets

“People don’t respect confidentiality in this industry, it’s tough enough to keep a secret within your own company, much less when you speak to third parties.”

The difficulty here is, when you’ve got a product like the PSP Go and you want to share it with developers so they can start making games for it, you don’t expect it to wind up on the internet. Which leads onto another problem, we all know Sony (Microsoft and Nintendo too) is working on their next system. Console development is an ongoing process that never stops, even when a new system comes out there are people behind the curtain working on something new.

“This is an industry that has trouble focusing on today,” he says “We want to constantly talk about tomorrow.… You have to prepare for people to know things in advance. The frustrating thing is they only know a part of the story and that opens up a lot of conjecture and misinformation that ultimately waters down the reality when you roll it out.”

Keeping a secret is always a minefield and right now I suspect Jack is wondering who, out of the second and third parties can be trusted with any future Sony developments without it becoming page fodder.

Source Games Industry

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