Interview with David Reeves - President and CEO of SCEE

[Shin-Ra]

MCV INTERVIEW: David Reeves

Definitely worth reading the whole interview but here's the juice:

A million sales each of its three consoles across PAL territories in December has put SCEE in a very good mood. Here, president David Reeves tells Lisa Foster all about a successful Christmas and his optimism for the year ahead...

And how do you feel PS3 is doing in terms of ‘catching up’ with your rivals who launched earlier?

We don’t often mention competition but I will give you some interesting data. In terms of installed base in some of our major markets, such as France, Spain, Germany, Italy, plus some distributor territories in smaller markets like Switzerland, our current cumulative installed base is now higher than that of Xbox 360.

It has not quite yet reached that in the UK. But the team here expect to overtake installed base of Xbox 360 across PAL territories in late summer. I would say before, but that is when we think we will overtake Xbox 360.

It’s worth mentioning that last week we outsold Xbox 360 in PAL territories by a ratio of 3:1.

Looking forward, how do you feel about the performance of PS3 and PSP through 2008?

I’m going to use the analogy that it is rather like a plane coming in to a runway and you can just about seeing the landing lights. That’s where we were before Christmas.

But now we can see those landing lights – and they are the big titles, such as Gran Turismo, GTA, Metal Gear Solid, Pro Evo, FIFA and Little Big Planet. These are the building blocks of our strategy for 2008.

We will also bring out the TV tuner which we will be rolling out into five major markets at the end of April.

In terms of Gran Turismo we still don’t have a date but I think that Yamauchi-San said it will come out by end of fiscal year, which is the end of March. That’s what I’m planning on at the moment. And PS3 Home is still on track for the spring.

With PSP our plan is to have more dedicated PSP games. We’re also going to be bringing out Skype, plus Go Messenger and Go Explore in March and April. And we’re tying up with Sky in the UK for the video download service in the summer.

PlayTV end of April, GT5 Prologue end of March.