David Reeves shares his thoughts and Sony's PS3 predictions - PS3

President of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, David Reeves, has shared his thoughts, and Sony's predictions, on the future of the Playstation brand, specifically the Playstation 3. Sony are predicting that sales from digital distribution will equal those of retail games within five years, and that the PS3 will be a factor in this industry transformation. “The PS3 install base is growing faster than PS2’s was at this point in its lifecycle,” said Reeves, who also mentioned that in time he expects the PS3 to eventually outsell the PS2’s 100m installed base. “We see the future in the video games industry, certainly in terms of software sales, as continuing to grow – new markets, new demographics, and new games appealing to new sectors of the industry,” said Reeves. “And the key to the future is the PlayStation Network. Games put straight onto the PSN are the big opportunity.”


Games like Gran Turismo HD were a good example of what's possible, Reeves said, saying Sony was “staggered” by recent figures which showed over 40 per cent of PS3 owners download games direct to their machines.

Reeves is confident that new revenue streams including episodic content, sales of in-game items and in-game advertising are adding up to create a rich environment for both players of games and the people making the content.

Imminent new PS3 online and community features such as Trophies, PlayStation Home, and commerce functions on the PlayStation Store were helping draw those things to PS3 - but he admitted that publishers face increased QA, localisation and content demands. “The next five years are going to be turbulent but I think that is going to be the most exciting period that we have ever seen in the past ten years of video games.

Latest Reader Comments:

Posted by RJG 20/06/2008 9:39pm

And we'll still get raped on region encoding, price fixing and limited releases, despite the fact that there is no longer ANY REASON for this shit to take place. Regional encodings were useful when TVs were not compatible with other formats, when there was massive differences between the value of our dollar and the US dollar and the cost of shipping overseas, and the sometimes MONTHS LONG delays between our release dates and those overseas.

MS and Sony are getting the delays down to about a week, but Nintendo is stuck in the past, in more ways than one. When we're on a global playing field, with everyone paying an equal amount for equal content on the same day, then I'll give a shit about their idea of progress.