From next-gen.biz:
[QUOTE]
Sony's Phil Harrison hits on the big issues within the PlayStation business in this extensive Next-Gen interview.

* Now the PS3 price cut. It happened recently and [PS3 sales] still didn't, in the US, pass the Xbox 360 in monthly NPD sales. If a $100 price cut hasn't done it yet for PlayStation 3, what is the next step?
* Well we had a great up-tick in sales as a result of that price cut, and these price moves are fairly predictable. Taking your starting and ending price point, you know largely what your increase in sales is going to be. What price moves often surprise us in, actually, is how long the message takes to get through to the consumer. You can change the price at a retailer pretty quickly, but [the sales increase happens] when [consumers] start seeing that price repeatedly advertised to them in the supplements that come out in the newspaper or in the print ads in the local paper or when they actually go to the store itself. So it can actually take weeks or months for the price message to really get into the psyche of the general consumer, obviously not the specialist gamer, but the more general mass market.
The second thing is that price alone is not enough to drive demand for the system. It has to be coupled with software and with demand for, in PlayStation 3's case, the other functions, like Blu-ray movies, network, et cetera. All of those are building up. This holiday season, we're going to see a really tremendous lineup of software from us and from third parties and also the increasing importance of Blu-ray disc as a movie format. So I think that it will come into its own over the next few weeks or months.

* It seems that both Sony and Microsoft often look at the Nintendo Wii and say, "oh yeah, Wii's great, its success is really good for the industry." Those kinds of compliments don't happen too often between Microsoft and Sony. Can you equally recognize the success that Microsoft has had?
* It would be churlish to try and suggest that you would wish ill on any company, because as I said, if the business has got a lot of momentum and it's aggressively acquiring new users, new forms of creativity are being accepted in the marketplace and the kind of games that we can make as creators gets wider, that's a great thing from a game designer point of view, from a game creating organization. That's incredibly empowering because it means that people's minds are more open to new challenges. In the 16-bit and the 8-bit era on 8-bit Nintendo and 16-bit Genesis and Nintendo, it was all about 2D platformers, some sports and that was it. And that's a pretty boring place to be.

* What do you consider the biggest factor in the PS3 overtaking Xbox 360, if that's destined to happen?
* First of all, we don't look at it in terms of short term notches, where we're trying to overtake that particular product or in that particular market. We just look at it in terms of a longer-term strategy. It actually reverts back to the earlier discussion about what we should be doing in our business to be the creative choice of the developers and the commercial choice of the publishers. If, as a game development studio, we can create the most compelling experiences that showcase our platforms in the most interesting way, that generate the most fun games for people to play, people will buy our systems. Now that has to be linked to great marketing, great promotion, the right price points, the kind of rising tide of Blu-ray disc adoption and an increasing adoption of networks. But those things will be fine. They'll all take care of themselves, but we just need to stay focused on building the right game content, bringing those to our systems, and then I'm pretty happy that everything else will fall into place.
[/QUOTE]

Full Story: next-gen.biz (3 pages)

Discuss on our forums: forums.ps3scene.com