PS3 price fixation "short-term thinking"

Jack Tretton has said that PlayStation 3 is "on the right path for the long term" and questioned the widespread obsession with console pricing.

"People are having short-term thinking - the platform is not even three years old. It was USD 599; it's now USD 399," the Sony America boss told Fast Company.

"The focus on pricing is something we appreciate, but you have to have the conviction and the confidence that you are on the right path for the long term and ultimately you'll get all the consumers you want.

"You won't get them all day one, but we're looking to get them over a 10-year period. It's going to take different things to get different consumers."

Tretton's overall message was that Sony won't be rushed into anything because the rules are different for a 10-year life cycle. For example, he said that traditional cost/benefit calculations went out of the window for certain games because their job was to promote certain aspects of the console's personality.

"We want the platform to be successful, we want to be profitable. But it is getting harder to measure that," he said. "And when you get down to a game like The Last Guardian, you can't just look at the number of units it sold versus it's development cost; it's what did you do to drive our message of diversity."