Blog of Tushar Phadke

Kutaragi talks PS4 now PS3 out the door

What a wacky week for Sony it has been: Ken Kutaragi prepares to retire on June 19, Sony kills a goat for the launch in Athens of God of War II, and now that the PS3 is out the door, Ken Kutaragi says he has the PS4, 5 and even 6 in mind

Exactly what Kutaragi means about the PS4, 5 and 6 ‘merging into the network’ is unclear, especially when he told eetimes.com that: “The design concept of the Cell processor is the network processor. Now it has become possible, so why not enter?”

Now that Kutaragi will soon part ways with Sony, eetimes.com reported that while “he will maintain an amicable relationship”, future projects will “largely be independent of Sony”. Specifically, Kutaragi told eetimes.com that: “Now I’m ready to start working with a much wider world”.

As for the reason why Kutaragi did not speak of the PS3’s successors earlier, aside from the obvious reason we can think of that they needed to get the PS3 out the door first and spoke about the PS3 being a platform for the next 10 years, Kutarai told eetimes.com that: “I could not talk about the next step. We’ve introduced PS3 in Europe, so now I can openly talk about” [future plans].

Precisely what effect this slightly startling news will have on upcoming PS3 sales, if any, is unclear. Chances are they’ll have no effect whatsoever, as any PS3 successor is likely to be at the very least 3 to 5 years away, given the traditional games console life-span of around 5 years, and given the enormous latent power that is meant to be packed within each and every PS3, just waiting for advanced games programming techniques to unleash it onto a high-def gaming hungry hardcore gamer world.

Still, at least Kutaragi has kept up his reputation for saying really interesting things that definitely have kept him in the headlines over the years, and especially so in the PS3 era.

Ken Kutaragi is most definitely a legend in the world of Sony and in the world of console gaming. Clearly we haven’t heard the last from him yet!