Culture

Sony CEO Still Selling 'Nintendo Is For Babies' Line

Here’s Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton in September 2006: [We] are carving this new road out and we are selling again to 20-something consumers that were not fans of portable entertainment, were not playing Game Boys because the technology and the software offerings just weren’t appealing to them… the handheld devices from Nintendo […]
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Here's Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton in September 2006:

[We] are carving this new road out and we are selling again to 20-something consumers that were not fans of portable entertainment, were not playing Game Boys because the technology and the software offerings just weren't appealing to them... the handheld devices from Nintendo and specifically in the case of the DS, we really feel like they're appealing to the same audience that Game Boy has always appealed to. And if you look at the adoption rate of the DS over the first 17 months, not only does it trail the PSP but it also trails their other platforms... They're potentially losing some of their core audience and they're not really expanding beyond that and we think we're expanding into a completely new audience as we did with PlayStation.

And here he is again in 2007:

I think the PS3 is the Surf ‘n Turf... [As for the other two consoles], one [Wii] is a lollipop, and I’m too old for lollipops. The other one [Xbox 360] I get sick from once in a while because the cook isn’t always reliable.

Boy, good thing the massive ass-whoopin' Nintendo gave to Sony beat this hoary old line out of Tretton, eh? No. Here he is today on 3DS:

Our view of the 'Game Boy experience' is that it's a great babysitting tool, something young kids do on airplanes, but no self-respecting twenty-something is going to be sitting on an airplane with one of those. He's too old for that.

Somebody's got to write Tretton a new stump speech. One that at least has some tenuous connection to reality.

By the by, here's Sony's John Koller on PSP back in 2009:

Our primary focus, and about 40 percent of our demographic right now, is in that 13- to 17-year-old consumer base. We’ve seen a lot of growth in the under-12, with UMD games in particular, and we’ve obviously made some noise about the Hannah Montana pack...

To be fair, if Hannah Montana could fly and make me breakfast, she would be the perfect portable device for the self-respecting twentysomething.