Naughty Dog Co-Founder: “Two Years Ago Microsoft Was Going to Win this Generation. That’s Not The Case Now”

Giuseppe Nelva November 10, 2013 4:38 PM EST

Naughty Dog Co-Founder and former Studio President Jason Rubin (he left the company in 2004) is quite confident in Sony’s possibilities to do well this generation, especially due to the internal change brought to the company by people like Mark Cerny, as he told while interviewed by Geoff Keighley on GameTrailers.

Having worked at Sony and having seen how Sony is, […] we have to give them an incredible amount of credit for this launch. Inside the industry, quietly, hush-hush, two years ago Microsoft was going to win this generation. And that’s not the case now. They have been very very smart, very very adept at changing their policies to fit what gamers wanted, and they’ve created an incredible hardware. The creator of that hardware, Mark Cerny, who I know extremely well, could have not done this in the PS3 era, because Ken Kutaragi was there and the entire company had a very different way of looking at things. I actually know better than most people the history of internal hardware production at Sony, because I went through this with Mark from Crash watching how hardware has gone. The change from the Kutaragi model to, i will call it, the Cerny model is far larger than anyone realizes. It is looking at the market and adapting to the market, rather than creating the ultimate graphics hardware from a technical standpoint and assuming the market will come.

While I’m not sure on who will “win” between Sony and Microsoft (and to be honest I don’t care all that much, as I prefer them both to compete and to prod each other into giving us as much as possible for our money), I have to agree with Rubin.

Even from the humble standpoint of a video game writer that isn’t as nearly as near to the control room as he was, the change within Sony is evident, and I think most gamers that play on PlayStation consoles and are witnessing the outset of this new generation can easily agree.