Reuters: Sony CEO dismisses price cut chatter on PlayStation
SUN VALLEY, Idaho, July 7 - Sony Corp Chief Executive Howard Stringer brushed off concerns that the PlayStation 3 video game console is too expensive, and said the company is unlikely to sell parts of its business amid the recession.
Stringer, arriving at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Tuesday, described recent comments about PlayStation's price by Robert Kotick, the CEO of video game publisher Activision Blizzard Inc, as standard business tactics.
"He likes to make a lot of noise," Stringer said, when asked about the comments. "He's putting pressure on me and I'm putting pressure on him. That's the nature of business."
Last month, Kotick told the Times of London that Activision might cease developing games for the PlayStation if Sony did not cut the price of the console, which competes with Microsoft Corp's Xbox and Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii.
"When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support the console," Kotick had said.
Asked about the logic of not cutting prices, Stringer said, "I (would) lose money on every PlayStation I make -- how's that for logic."
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
