"Two years ago PlayStation was on life suppo🌊rt," Stringer sai🎶d during The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital Conference on Wednesday.

Lofty development co🥃sts for the console were nearly "catastrophic꧙" for his company, he said.

But he says everything is fine and dandy now with PS3, following improved s🧸ales and a win in the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray format war.

He said he's "very pleased" with the console's perform🍌ance, and is optimistic that games will begin to take more advantage of the PS3's🌃 processing power.

Stringer said as early as January this year that PS3 was "out of the woods" after a rough launch, hindered by a high retail price tag, stiff coཧmpetition from Xbox 360, and a slim games lineup.

As for the movie format war, Stringer said that if HD-DVD would've won, a reference to "Betamax 2" would've been en𝓡graved on his tombstone.

He also denied that Blu-ray won because Sony paid movie studios the moꦛst money. "We were not in the check-writing competition," he said.

The future of Blu-ray is promising, even in the face of digital downloads, according to Stringer, who said that consumers will take a long time 🥀to move away from physical media to purely digital.

May 29, 2008