Reeves: PS3 price cut would annoy people

In an interview with Steve Boxer on semi-official Sony blog

Three Speech

, SCEE president David Reeves has said that the fact that PS3 arrived later in Europe than other global territories means that it’s still too early to consider cutting the price of the machine.

We’ve only been on the market for three and a bit months,” Reeves explained. Our thought process was ‘wait a minute, we’re actually not doing too badly – we’re not selling as well as Wii or DS – but seasonality-wise, compared to, say, PS2 at the same time we launched it in 2001, we’re actually doing quite well on a regional level’.

July is not really a gamers’ month unless you get a big, big title. So we thought if we reduced the price, we’d annoy a lot of people. We did think about it, but we also felt that it wasn’t doing that badly. In the US, they’ve 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.”

Reeves also went on to explain that he sees the UK as a unique market, which leads to more intensive price wars.

In the UK, there’s intense competition. The situation in the UK is unique – it is so competitive. People are going to come out at 399 with a game, to get people into the store to buy another game and another game. That’s the name of the game.

In France, for example, you can’t do that because there’s a law on price-control. In Germany, they hold the prices – you can even go onto Amazon.de and they won’t pull the prices down or put offers in. Even in Russia, they’re not discounting. I do think that the UK is a unique situation and you’re going to see all sorts of deals.”

He finished by insisting that this Q4 will not make or break the global fortunes of PS3 – instead hinting that the real battleground will be Q4 ’08.

I think each peak is crucial to maximise what you can do, but I don’t think this Christmas is necessarily the most critical one – I think that’s going to be Christmas 08. I see this more as kind of like a tsunami – it starts small and gathers speed, and eventually, after four or five years, it will start to take you over. At least, that’s the way we’ve mapped it out.”