It appears the disappointing PlayStation 3 has claimed its first executive victim inside Sony. Sony and PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi made a joint statement Thursday saying Kutaragi would retire from his position as chairman and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment as of the company's next shareholders meeting on June 19, and that he has "been considering this decision for some time." "I am happy to graduate from Sony Computer Entertainment after introducing four platforms to the PlayStation family," Kutaragi said in a statement.
Kutaragi is one of the most celebrated figures in consumer electronics history, having shipped more than 200 million PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles, as well as the PlayStation Portable. Some analysts believe that had the been perceived as a hit or even a mild hit, there's a good chance he would be sticking around for the full 10-year lifecycle Sony gives its consoles. But the is widely seen as a commercial flop, given its third-place position among next-generation video game consoles, trailing Microsoft's second-place Xbox 360 and the surprising leader, Nintendo's genre-busting The PS3 is even trailing sales of the venerable PlayStation 2 at this point.
The "PlayStation 3 has been a huge disappointment, No. 3 out of three in terms of console sales," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. "It's been a huge embarrassment for the firm, and a huge hole that money has been pouring into.
" Enderle said despite Kutaragi's massive success with previous iterations of the PlayStation, he probably couldn't survive the very public drubbing the PS3 has gotten in the market so far. "When you go from superstar to walking disaster, there are few executives that can survive that," Enderle said. "You're only as good as your last financial report, and while he was given some leeway (with the PS3) there were obviously some huge mistakes.
" Enderle said the biggest of those mistakes--the pricey inclusion of the player in the PS3--may well have been forced on Kutaragi by others at Sony. The Blu-ray player , making it, at a top price of $599, far more expensive than the $399 top-end Xbox and $250 Wii--and also making it much later to market than planned. "It really is Blu-ray that killed him," Enderle said.
"As a result, and expensive, and that did a huge amount of damage to their sales volume." At the same time, Nintendo's Wii has stolen the video game industry's thunder, leading the next-generation console wars with 259,000 sales in March, according to The NPD Group, largely on the strength of its innovative . By comparison, the Xbox 360 sold 199,000 units in March, and the PS3 trailed far behind, with only 130,000 sales.
Yet for some, it may even be surprising that Kutaragi survived the Sony restructuring that saw the ascendance of . Kutaragi in many ways represented the "old" Sony. He was big on vision--he saw the PlayStation line as a vehicle that would allow Sony to take over electronic entertainment in the home--but the projects sometimes didn't live up to the vision.
The PlayStation 2 was instrumental in accelerating demand for DVD players and discs. The player, however, didn't become an all-encompassing media server. The long-anticipated console vs.
PC war never materialized in the way many expected. People bought PlayStations, but continued to go to their PCs when they wanted to get on the Internet or send e-mail. The PlayStations have also proven expensive to produce, largely because of elaborate, customized silicon.
In 1999, the processor and the graphics chip inside the PS2 took up 239 and 279 square millimeters in surface area, respectively, which made them relatively large (and hence relatively expensive) chips for their time. Sony often spoke of how the processor inside the PS2, called the Emotion Engine, would be used in other computers. The constant chip improvements defined by allowed Sony to drop the cost of its components.
By 2004, the two chips were condensed into one that took up only 87 square millimeters, almost one-sixth the size of the prior chip. But neither the Emotion Engine nor Sony's graphics chip threatened Intel's or anyone else's chip markets. Computer makers did not pick it up.
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