Edge sat down with Tretton earlier this week, as he talked about the future of PlayStation 3, PS3 and PSP as well as Sony Corp, competitors, the past, the media and the PlayStation community.

On The Media

I’m very passionate about what I do and passionate about the company I work for. I’m passionate about the industry and I like to talk about it.

Anybody who knows me will typically say ‘he’s a straight shooter; ask him a question you get an honest answer’. Unfortunately with the press that’s not always the best trait. Stuff lives on forever, regardless of whether it’s quoted in context or out of context. What you mean to say and what is interpreted could be very, very different. But I try to be as frank as possible.

On Sony’s Weaknesses

We’re a great hardware technology company. We have great engineers and great hardware that can do some incredible things. One of Sony’s fundamental weaknesses is that there’s one element in the company that thinks we’re a hardware company and there’s another element of the company that thinks we’re a software company. Oftentimes the two don’t meet.

What typically happens is the hardware guys create this great technology and they hand it to the software guys and say ‘here, see what you can do with this’ and it takes a learning curve for the software engineers to really get their arms around.

We’re getting better. As we move forward we’ve got to do a better job of having a collaborative effort between the software side of development and the hardware side. We made an improvement on the PlayStation 3 but unfortunately the technology got harder, so you didn’t see the improvements as much as we would have liked. But it’s getting better. I have less anxiety about this, than I did two years ago.

On Microsoft

I have a pretty good understanding of what they are doing. Every company thinks that they invented the wheel but I have to tell you; we must be doing a lot of things right because we’re seeing them do things that remind me a lot of what we’re doing.

On Third Party Exclusives

The software companies looked out at the cost of development and said ‘there’s no check big enough that we’re going to be able to do exclusive content’.  They believe that they’ve got to be on as many platforms as possible. The exception is Japan where Microsoft isn’t that big a player. FFXIII remains exclusive in Japan

But it’s going to be harder and harder to hold onto any exclusives long term and that’s why exclusives to me mean Resistance 2, Little Big Planet, Motorstorm. You’ve got to create platform defining franchises that you own and that’s the only way you can ensure they’re going to be exclusive going forward.

Let’s remember that from Day One, Sony has invested in internal development. Today we pour the vast majority of our financial resources, over half of our employee base, into internal development all over the world. We’ve tried to organically build up our worldwide studios and our internal development and that’s where we’ve chosen to invest our dollars.