Kevin Ohannessian: How do you measure the effectiveness of a game, beyond the monetary value alone?
Jack Tretton: We tend to look at things in 10-year increments when a lot of people tend to look at in five, and then they boil it down to three as the make-or-break time. And I think if you have that narrow of a view you take much less risk. We want the platform to be successful, we want to be profitable. But it is getting harder to measure that. And when you get down to a game like The Last Guardian, you can’t just look at the number of units it sold versus it’s development cost; it’s what did you do to drive our message of diversity.
You have to look at things over a long-term period. It’s extremely difficult to do in our industry, and even more difficult to do in this economy. In our industry it’s all about now, “When are you going to drop you price? When’s the new system coming out? What’s the new game?” You have to take a step back and not get caught up in that. But it gets more and more difficult in this economy because people don’t have the patience to say, “You’re not profitable today, or that game didn’t make money today, but it’s kind of setting up for three or five years down the road.” In this economy people go, “There may not be any tomorrow, so it’s all about today.” So I think that attitude is being tested now more than it ever has.
Read the full article at Fast Company.