Ken Kutaragi, the founder of PlayStation and architect of the first three PlayStation consoles, has said that people being upset about Sony’s discontinuation of game discs is probably a “mentality issue”. He understands it, he noted, but that doesn’t make it “economically reasonable” for Sony to keep printing them.
Kutaragi was speaking to Video Games Chronicle at the Game Republic New Horizons event, where he said: “I understand that physical discs have become a metaphor for ‘owning’ games. I really understand that mentality… But nobody thinks [physical media] is necessary for a networked device like a smartphone, for example, because people feel that they will keep their content. So it’s a mentality.
“I really understand [why some people are upset],” he added, “but I don’t think it’s economically reasonable. Maybe it’s a mentality issue.”
Kutaragi retired from PlayStation in June 2007, shortly after the PlayStation 3’s European release, so he’s been out of the company for a while. Two generations of consoles have passed since he left, though I’m sure he has close ties to Sony and people working there still. “I’m not the CEO at PlayStation any more,” he noted in the interview, “but we still have some common [view points].”
Maybe Sony is pushing towards an all-digital device, he remarked, in a similar way that we see smartphones and other devices. “Maybe that’s how those people are thinking,” he said. “But this has caused some friction with game enthusiasts.”
Kutaragi, who’s currently the CEO of Ascent Robotics and owner of Cyber AI Entertainment, also expressed concern at the price of hardware in today’s component shortage-ridden market. He said machines are “super expensive and that’s not a healthy situation”; comments backed up by news from the weekend that PlayStation 6’s memory and storage alone reportedly cost more than $680.
Kutaragi’s advice? Harness AI and cloud computing to their full potential and “we won’t need any console”. I don’t think that’ll go down terribly well, Ken.