Monday, November 06, 2006

Sony's Karakker On PS3 Buzz Renewal @ CMP

Sony's new PR boss Dave Karraker has been talking exclusively to Gamasutra on job shepherding the PlayStation 3's launch through, and he's surprisingly frank on both the problems and the positives of the media giant's upcoming challenges.

Though the full interview includes plenty more detail on Karraker's background and PS3 and PSP specifics, but Karraker explains why he believes negative buzz has been focused on the PS3 of recent:

"The backlash that we’re seeing, a lot of it comes from being number one in the market. And it’s not interesting if somebody just succeeds and succeeds and succeeds. I think a lot of this falls on the shoulders of the media. You don’t sell magazines or blogs by saying Sony’s great, Sony’s great, Sony’s great.

That doesn’t generate reader interest, people want to see that maybe there are some chinks in the armor. But at the end of the day if you’d ask people if they’d like a PS3 or nothing at all, they’re gonna say I want a PS3!"


He then explains exactly what Sony are going to do to change the playing field:

"We were allowing media to drive the message for us, and interpret it for us. So allowing someone like Peter Moore, who’s a good friend of mine, to stand up there and say negative things about Sony, there wasn’t anybody refuting that. People just took that for face value. Now we’re very aggressively defending our turf, and attempting to right all the wrongs that have been said about us in the past, which includes misrepresentation of quotes from our executives. I think you’ve probably seen the difference, just in the last couple months, where if somebody goes out and says something negative about Sony, we’re not going to sit back and allow that. We’re going to position it properly, and provide the facts."

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