Q: So why didnt we get a PS3 price-cut in the UK?
David Reeves: If youre a consumer and we introduced the PS3 in March for £425 or 599 Euros lets say you bought one at the end of April and have been using it, playing Resistance: Fall of Man and MotorStorm. Weve only been on the market for three and a bit months. Our thought process was: Wait a minute were actually not doing too badly were not selling as well as Wii or DS but seasonality-wise, compared to, say, PS2 at the same time we launched it in 2001, were actually doing quite well on a regional level. Its exactly the target that we sought. July is not really a gamers month unless you get a big, big title. So we thought if we reduced the price, wed annoy a lot of people. We did think about it, but we also felt that it wasnt doing that badly. In the US, theyve been going for more than six months, so they took the decision that going down in price was a better thing to do than a value pack.
Q: The fact remains that right now, if you want to buy a 60GB PS3 over here admittedly with an extra controller and game it will cost you £425, but in the States, it will cost £250. That raises the spectre of grey-market imports, which Sony has been tough on in the past. Is that something that worries you?
DR: The value in there is £120 to £125. We know that most people, anyway are going to buy two to 2.5 games. So when you do the maths, its going to be $499, which is £250, plus two games and a Sixaxis controller. So thats going to come up to £380 to £390. But theres VAT in Europe, so you have to take 15 per cent off, and theres GST in the US, and the average sales tax is 8.5 per cent. So when we did the maths, and this is the case in Australia as well, they are exactly the same. We could have omitted the Sixaxis controller and just put two games in, but it wasnt enough we wanted to have a level playing field. But not drop the price because we believe that dropping the price in the summer doesnt work.
If you drop the price in the summer, the sales rate goes up for a couple of weeks, because theres not much demand out there, and then the sales rate comes down again until you get to the end of September/the beginning of October, and it all starts to heat up. Weve had more success doing that either earlier in the year, in March, or later in the year, but doing it in the summer just hasnt worked for us. Weve tended to do these starter or value-added packs, and people have come out and said: You know, thats not bad. That keeps us going in the summer. But we realised we had to to use an old Chris Deering expression take some air out of the tyres to get to the next level.
Q: What are the big first-party PS3 games that really stand out for you beyond Killzone 2?
DR: They havent been announced, but Ill give you the thought process. We now have, every quarter, something called Gameshow where we all get together globally and look a what Worldwide Studios are producing. Now, we dont see every game at every session, but every session, we see five or six new IPs which we can rate. I can, hand on heart, say that there are six or seven such games, coming in the next 18 months, which are absolutely spectacular. There are some that are very emotional one of the objectives we gave Phil Harrison is to make people cry. We know that in the middle and the back end of next year, these are going to come out and people will say: I have never seen anything like that before. We just have to be a little bit patient there will be more God of Wars and so on. What has been remarkable is that there was a crash programme to put games ion the PlayStation Network LittleBigPlanet was originally designed for that. Well see that some of them will be online, but some will be done as full-blown games. We started that programme over three years ago.
OMG did he actually say that. What a sap.
