Father of PlayStation Leaves Sony

by Anton Shilov
06/19/2007 | 09:27 PM

Ken Kutaragi, the former head of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. and the man widely recognized as the “father” of all three PlayStation game consoles has retired from all executive positions at the company following major problems that the latest PlayStation 3 has faced in the past quarters.

As announced, on June, 19, the former chief of Sony’s game unit retired from his executive managements positions of chairman and group chief executive. Mr. Kutaragi will serve SCEI as honorary chairman of the group and will also continue to support Howard Stringer, chairman and chief executive of, Sony Corp., as a senior technology advisor. However, without the power of an executive, the “father of PlayStation” will hardly be able to seriously influence further development of the console.

Analyst and observers believe that along with departure of the creator of the original PlayStation, a whole era ends for Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. Mr. Kutaragi has engineering background and was concentrated on creating ultimate hardware for the PlayStation. By contrast, Kaz Hirai, who has become the chief of SCEI, came to the game unit from Sony’s music entertainment division, has marketing background and is believed to have better working relationships with game developers that Mr. Kutaragi.

Ken Kutaragi came under fire when it turned out that the latest PlayStation 3 game console is expensive to manufacture and because of Blu-ray laser production problems the launch of the console in Europe had to be postponed.

Due to exceptional price of the PlayStation 3, which, perhaps, has no technical advantages over Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and is more than two times more expensive than Nintendo’s Wii, shipments of the gaming machine even to stores were below expectations of Sony. The company shipped 5.5 million PlayStation 3 gaming machines in the fiscal year through March 31, fewer than the 6 million the company had targeted. Meanwhile, Nintendo shipped 5.84 million Wii game consoles worldwide throughout the same period.