Maguire is "shopkeeper-slash-pop star"

Sony UK boss Ray Maguire has said he resembles a "shopkeeper-slash-pop star" on an internet, where "everyone now is a journalist".

"There's a whole change in the way that consumers behave now, and it's not just games consumers, it's all consumers," Ray Maguire told GamesIndustry.biz.

"With the internet we've become a different breed - no longer do we sit back in our homes absorbing communications from brands. Everyone now is a journalist, or a publisher, or an artist - we're in an environment where I am a shopkeeper-slash-pop star through the social networks that I have, for example.

"Because of this there's a real immediacy of information going around. Now, whether this information is right or wrong, it doesn't matter - we now absorb things very quickly, and because of that we also want results very quickly as well," he said.

Maguire also believes the industry will soon, collectively, need to offer better value to consumers to tackle the effects of the global economic slump.

But when asked whether the PS3 will dip in price to accommodate this, he escaped with some rather familiar reasoning.

"It's a possibility, it's always a possibility. Alternatively it could be that people think that if they go for a lower-spec machine, that by the time they add in another hard-drive, and this and that, they'll end up with something which still doesn't play Blu-ray movies," he said.

"So if you're doing some detailed cost analysis as a consumer - which of course, they don't, they buy emotively - then the answer is that the PS3 turns out to be good value."

He added: "Obviously everyone wants to see products cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper, and that is the pressure that always comes from the consumer level."

Head over to GamesIndustry.biz for the full interview with Sony UK boss Ray Maguire, in which he talks about PlayStation Home, bigging-up PS3 to PSP connectivity, and innovating as a first-party publisher.