Sony's David Reeves
On PS3, PSP and what the future holds.
There are a couple. You can probably guess, but we have not formally announced them. They will most likely be announced in the next four to six weeks. They may even keep some for E3 or Cologne.
No, I don't.
The competition has been such that publishers have had four consoles, plus PC, to publish for. They did not put their chips on PSP, certainly in the US and Europe.
In Japan, a lot of publishers put their chips on PSP. So games like Monster Hunter, Phantasy Star Portable and Dissidia have caused enormous spikes for PSP in Japan. But there haven't been big platform drivers in Europe.
Now I can look you in the face and say, the line-up for PSP in 2009 is two or three times stronger than it was last year. We ran out of steam on games around August, September last year. We didn't have a Monster Hunter or a Dissidia. But probably from March to July, you're going to see that type of thing starting to kick in.
I don't know. It depends on the quality of the games, doesn't it? People come out on DS and want to compete against Nintendo first-party, and that's a tough thing.
It's like when you watch six year-old boys play football, and they all follow the ball right the way across the field. Sometimes developers and publishers do that, and that's what they've done with DS.
I worry about it, but it comes back to how thin they have to spread the butter. It would have been nice if some of those had come out, and I think they will eventually, but they can only place their chips on so many slots.
If you look at the statistics, more than 80 per cent of those games come in through telecommunications, as opposed to being downloaded. We are not planning to have any SIM card in any of our devices, so we have to think whether it would be as successful if we did something similar.
I was not aware of that... How do we anticipate how much the retail trade is going to discount? That's an art, not a science. It may be that we have to have differential pricing.
You could argue the same with iTunes. You don't have to get in your car and go out, queue up at the store, buy it and come back. You can just download it, and there it is. That's what children do all the time. If we have to think boxed products, I think we're dinosaurs.
It's still possible, but it's going to be later rather than sooner.
No, I'm not saying that. You didn't give me your timeline - whether it's minutes, weeks, months or years...
There is no timeframe. I stand by what I said. It is possible, yes, to have a fixed hard drive or flash memory. But what's happened is, the rate at which memory stick prices have come down have surprised everyone.
Europe certainly will make money this fiscal year, from Sony Computer Entertainment's point of view. We are already on track to do that. Even with the recession we've got to ramp it up, to keep that install base and that momentum going. The priority now is still to make money, or at least to get to break even.
I have never even heard it mentioned. I think people are concentrating so much on what's happening now that they're not even thinking about it.
David Reeves is president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.