Tretton – “PS3 Just Hitting Its Stride”, Enjoying “Best Year In The Past Five”

To gamers calling for the next round of consoles to happen now, head of Sony Corp.’s U.S. operations, Jack Tretton, has a word for you – “PlayStation’s just hitting its stride”.

That’s what the executive said while speaking in an interview with Bloomberg, adding the PlayStation brand has been an asset to Sony as a company.

“We did ten million units of PlayStation 3 two years ago,” said Tretton, “13 million last year and we’re going to end our fiscal year in a couple weeks here, and we’re on track to do 15 million, and our software business is up 35 percent.

So we are clearly enjoying this interest in gaming.”

When pressed on the profitability of Sony’s gaming business, which, according Bloomber, hasn’t been profitable in five years, Tretton said:

“That’s the good news. I think we’ve been an extremely big profit contributor to Sony’s overall success but the PlayStation 3 was clearly a major investment and I think it pays great dividends not only in gaming, but also in winning the high definition format wars with Blu-Ray, and we’re now seeing PlayStation 3 be in the center of the living room.

So it’s contributing in the success of the TV division, prerecorded home video area, we’re clearly playing a large role in 3D adoption so I think we’re contributing to Sony’s overall success. And the good news is we’re now profitable in our games division and PlayStation 3 is just hitting its stride – we’re having our best year in the past five in the games division.”