games (pun totally intended) at this year's SCEA E3 Press Conference, but being pissed in front of several hundred journalists wouldn't serve any good purpose. In a recent interview with CNBC, Tretton, the CEO and president of SCEA, expressed major disappointment in the fact that many of Sony's big E3 announcements got leaked beforehand. The PSP Go!, the PS3 Motion Controller, Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker (the newest MGS for the PSP) and Gran Turismo (also for the PSP, and it should be noted that it had already been announced at the 2004 E3) were all leaked before the conference. The PS3 Slim, which is coming out later this year, was not announced at E3, has also been leaked.

“I'm surprised any of you guys showed up,” joked Tretton at the press conference, regarding to the fact that the big secrets had been leaked out. During the CNBC interview, however, Tretton took a different route regarding the leaks stating, “People don’t respect confidentiality in this industry, it’s tough enough to keep a secret within your own company, much less when you speak to third parties.” While it's unknown who the leaker inside SCEA is, he or she can be assured that Tretton wants to eat their children. “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. 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,” he went on to say.

It's 100% true. Talk of a new console starts as soon as the next console gets released. I remember the XBOX360 launch and while speaking with people camping out in the lines, I spoke with several people who wanted to know what is next, and more importantly, what will it be called (my vote is for XBOX 4, and though I know it's not the 4^th system, the next logical number above 360 is 4 -not 720- and it will most likely go up against Sony's PlayStation 4). The same conversation occurred during the PS3 launch.

In an industry that's all about sequels, it'd be hard not to think of the future. More people look forward to the next Modern Warfare, GTA, Madden, etc than they do the next new fresh IP like Brink or The Conduit. While leaks of massive proportions don't really affect the software side of games as much as the hardware side, both suffer immensely. Games like Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3 leaked over the internet over a month before they where scheduled to be released. Most recently, Prototype, Red Faction Guerilla, and Terminator Salvation all leaked about a week before their retail release. It's certainly not as devastating for a game to release early as a system is (although the street date is enforced much more on systems than games), it still affects the industry.

The leak of the PS3 slim, while unacknowledged by Tretton (and for that matter anybody at SCEA) during E3, while not as shocking as the PSP Go!, certainly troubles SCEA. "I'd love to live in a world with fewer leaks and more meat," said John Koller, director of Hardware Marketing, when asked DIRECTLY about the PS3 Slim to Ars Technica. While it certainly doesn't confirm anything it's interesting that he didn't flat out deny the existence of such a machine, and referred it to a “leak” as opposed to a “rumor”. It should also be noted that the same person that leaked the now-confirmed PSP Go information is the same person that leaked the PS3 Slim information.

Before E3, the “informant” said that the PSP Go would be revealed at E3 but the PS3 slim would not. Why? You might ask, the reason is fairly simple. Announcing a new PS3 sku would be suicide right now if you consider their goal to be selling most of the current model PS3s before putting the slim on the shelves. Who would buy an 80gb PS3 “large” when they know a slim 120gb PS3 will come out in August or September (dates pending) for the same or lower price?

It was a different story with the PSP Go, more importantly because they are not replacing the PSP-3000 with the Go, but are selling both side by side. If the Go were to replace the 3000, I'm sure we wouldn't have heard anything until the current amount of PSP-3000's on the shelves were a bit drier than they are now.

With more and more sources supporting the existence of the PS3 slim (The BBC to be the most recent to jump on the bandwagon with the statement “The new PS3 model will be out later this year, BBC News understands.” It should also be noted that the BBC is owned and operated by the UK government, who wouldn't really post such news on a rumor), it will certainly be interesting to see how this leak affects sales. So what do you think?