Sony's Tretton: 'People Don’t Respect Confidentiality In This Industry'

At Sony Computer Entertainment America's E3 briefing last week, SCEA CEO Jack Tretton poked fun at how much of the company's big announcements were leaked weeks prior, as he proclaimed Sony was not only a gaming leader, but a "leader in leaks." Leaks are common in the games industry, but in an interview with CNBC, Tretton was more perturbed than he was on the E3 stage. "People don’t respect confidentiality in this industry," he lamented. "It’s tough enough to keep a secret within your own company, much less when you speak to third parties." Sony's big announcements included a motion-sensing controller (a patent for such tech surfaced last year and circulated the web), the disc-free PSPgo (the final design leaked onto the web days before E3 began), and Team Ico's highly-anticipated next game, The Last Guardian (early footage of the game also surfaced in the weeks leading up to E3). Tretton added, "This is an industry that has trouble focusing on today. We want to constantly talk about tomorrow.… You have to prepare for people to know things in advance." In the end, leaked information takes much of the wind out of the sails of big announcements. "The frustrating thing is they only know a part of the story and that opens up a lot of conjecture and misinformation that ultimately waters down the reality when you roll it out."