E3: Tretton places blame on third parties

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at an E3 roundtable, SCEA president Jack Tretton addressed the issue of some games looking better on the 360 than they do on the PS3.

"If the games don't look good on the platform, consumers aren't going to buy them. As I said, we can't control what third parties are going to do," explained Tretton. "We can try to evangelize the technology and assist those guys in development and try to convince them that it is in their best interests to take advantage of the technology.

"If we have to drive the message on our platform with the games that do that--whether they are first party or third--those are the games we are going to focus on and those are the games the consumers are going to make their purchase decisions on," he said.

"At some point, what's the point of porting it over to another platform if it is not going to look as good on a platform that is more expensive? Why waste any money in development doing that?"

When asked if that meant SCEA needed to pick up the slack with first-party titles, Tretton said that wasn't the message he wanted to send.

"The message I want to send is, we can't control what the third parties do," he explained. "We want to encourage them as much as possible, we want to support them as much as possible--to your point, we want to give them the tools.

"We're a company that does about 20 plus per cent of our business on first party, so believe me, I don't want to send the message that we don't need the third parties. We want to encourage them to maximize their development potential on our platform.

"But if a game doesn't showcase our technology, I don't know that is going to help either of us."