Talking to Gamasutra during a one-on-one interview, Peter Dille, the new senior vice president of marketing for PlayStation, maintained that the 360 cannot sustain itself over a 10 year cycle – and also stated that he believes HD-DVD will be dead within months. Here’s an excerpt of the conversation, which will eventually be published in full:
I feel like now we’re at a 10 year cycle for console profitability for everyone except Nintendo at this point...
Peter Dille: Except Microsoft too!
I’m not saying they’re profitable.
PD: They’re also not 10 year! The first Xbox was around for 4 or 5 years, and then they stopped making software for it.
I’m just saying it’s a longer tail before Sony and Microsoft will make money.
PD: I don’t want to be argumentative, but I take issue with Microsoft either having a long tail, or being profitable, because they’ve never done either. They’ve never made a dime in this business, number one, and number two, they’ve never had a tail. They’ve never been successful enough to have a tail! So the notion of a back half of the curve doesn’t exist for them. They stopped the Xbox and I kind of feel for the guy that bought an Xbox the month before they said ‘we’re out of business, we’re moving on.’
The reason I get a little emotional about that is it’s in stark contrast to our approach. If we’ve got something that says PlayStation, we’re going to stand behind it for 10 years, and deliver games like God of War II in the 7th year of the cycle.
With the Xbox 360 you’ve got an inconsistent design, some have a hard drive, some don’t, and none of them have Blu-Ray, and the HD-DVD will be out of business in a matter of months. Is this a 10 year product? And by the way, it doesn’t even work. Do they want to be selling it for 10 years and refurbishing them all for 10 more years? I don’t think that’s a 10 year product. You could disagree with me, or they could disagree with me, but I’d put that up against the PS3 any day.
