Sony: Nintendo DS is a ‘babysitting tool’, Xbox 360 and Wii ‘running out of steam’

Every now and then, some suit comes along from Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo to take a snide shot at the competition. Today, it’s Sony Computer Entertainment America CEO Jack Tretton, who’s decided to bag on everything in the games industry. Except Sony stuff, obv.

In an interview with CNN, Tretton dismissed the Nintendo DS as a “babysitting tool,” suggested the Wii and Xbox 360 were losing momentum (there is, at least, some truth in this), and implied Sony’s products were all pretty much perfect. Let’s start with the Nintendo DS, sorry, Game Boy:

“Our view of the ‘Game Boy experience’ is that it’s a great babysitting tool, something young kids do on airplanes, but no self-respecting 20-something is going to be sitting on an airplane with one of those. He’s too old for that.”

And now the Wii and Xbox 360:

“They’re starting to run out of steam now in terms of continuing to be relevant in 2011 and beyond. I mean, you’ve gotta be kidding me. Why would I buy a gaming system without a hard drive in it? How does this thing scale? Motion gaming is cute, but if I can only wave my arms six inches, how does this really feel like I’m doing true accurate motion gaming?”

That’s when Tretton switches from troll to cheerleader, bragging over the PlayStation 3’s recent sale successes:

“If you’re really going to sustain technology for a decade, you have to be cutting edge when you launch a platform,” he said. “Here we are four years into the Playstation 3, and it’s just hitting its stride. We’ll enjoy a long downhill roll behind it because the technology that was so cutting edge in 2006 is extremely relevant today and is conspicuously absent in our competition.”

Note here how Tretton avoids mentioning the train crash that was the PSP Go!, or the fact that Kinect is outselling PlayStation Move to a quite embarrassing degree.

[CNN, via GamePolitics]