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E3 2007: Tretton Wants Third-Parties To Step Up

In speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at an E3 roundtable, SCEA president Jack Tretton blamed third-party developers for not harnessing the power of the PS3. He was addressing the issue that some Xbox 360 games still look better than some PS3 titles.

“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."

Naturally, this led to the question: should Sony step things up in first-party development in order to pick up the slack? Tretton didn't want everyone to misunderstand, and clarified his message with the following-

“The message I want to send is, we can’t control what the third parties do. 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," he said. “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 partes. We want to encourage them to maximize their development potential on our platform."

At this point, we have to agree that some of the most impressive-looking upcoming PS3 titles are first (or second)-party ( Killzone 2 , Gran Turismo 5 , etc.), but we do see Tretton's point. And it's a point some publishers have talked about in the past; some of the more confident ones saying things to the effect of, "if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen." The PS3 is a very powerful system, and it will take some time before developers will be completely comfortable with it. However, we've no doubt that time is coming, and when it does, we're fully prepared to be blown away.