"A very exciting time"

eu.playstation.com caught up with David Reeves, President of SCEE at Games Convention in Leipzig to find out what's in store for PS2, PS3, PSN and PSP in the upcoming year.

Playstation.com: Why is Leipzig important to SCEE?

David Reeves: First of all, this is an important point in the history of PS3, and Leipzig comes at exactly the right time in the year when all the games are coming together and all our plans are coming together. It means that we've been able to make some important announcements in the run-up to Christmas.

It's also important because it's a focal point now for a lot of journalists from Europe, from America and even from Japan to come along to see what's on offer, not just from ourselves, but from our third party publishing partners as well.

How do you feel the PS3 launch has gone?

The PS3 launch for Europe has gone very well. As you know we launched six months later than Japan and the US and, in the space of four months, we've already reached an install base of just over 1.3 million units. At the moment we're selling between 30,000 and 40,000 units a week which by anyone's standards is very good. On a cumulative basis, if I compare it with PS2 we're just a little bit short of PS2 at exactly the same time, so I think that's quite a good benchmark.

How do you think the business is changing with the advent of downloadable content?

We have been surprised that we've got over a 40% registration rate for PLAYSTATION Network, even though some territories like Italy, the Middle East and Russia have got fairly low broadband penetration. What's interesting is that many consumers have come on and not only browsed and downloaded demos but about 10% have actually bought from PLAYSTATION Store. Our total income from the Store is currently north of 4 million euros. I would say that we're on a very steep learning curve here, we are learning as much from our consumers as they are learning about our games online. So it's a very exciting time.

What is the plan for the PLAYSTATION Store in the upcoming year?

We have three plans of action. The first one is that over the next year we have to improve the navigation and the search functions on the store. At the moment the architecture is ok but we know that to be competitive we have to take it forward very quickly.

Secondly, we want to get as much original content on there as possible. We've got things like Calling All Cars! and Blast Factor but there's a lot more coming in from Worldwide Studios that is going to go up before Christmas and into 2008.

The third thing is that we want to embrace our third party publishers a lot more and encourage them to put more content onto PSN because 75% of our business in this region is from third party publishers. So we want to try and replicate that in the online market - we know they've got some great content and we want to try and get them to put that on.

Why was the decision made to redesign the PSP? What new features can we expect for PSP in the upcoming year?

We felt that the functionality of PSP was 99% perfect. When people play it they love the screen, the controls are good and the analogue stick feels great, so we didn't really want to change the form factor too much. But in focus groups that we've done all over the world, people said that it wasn't entirely portable because of the weight and because it was a certain thickness. So we decided not to change the form factor, to keep the screen where it was, but to make it lighter - it's now down to 180 grams - and to make it slimmer. There's a limit of course to how slim we can make it as we still have to fit a UMD drive in there as well, but I think that if you compare them you'll notice a big difference. We're also coming out with some new colours - a silver one, a yellow one in honour of the Simpsons and a red and black one in honour of Spider-Man.

PS.com: PS2 has exceeded most consoles' life cycles already, but it's still selling a huge amount - are we coming to the end for PS2 or is there still life in it?

There are so many life cycles within the life cycle - I'd say that perhaps we're coming towards the end of the life cycle in countries like Switzerland where they're early adopters and a lot of them have already gone on to either PS3, Wii or Xbox 360, but in countries like UAE or other areas of the Middle East or eastern Europe it's the beginning of the life cycle. There are so many games out there that even in countries like the UK, Germany and Italy we're still seeing tremendous demand for PS2. I think what's driving it really are the number of games that are available and the new games that are coming out. So the answer to the question is that in some countries it will be the end of the lifecycle fairly soon, but in others you're going to see that lifecycle go on for at least, I would say 10 - 11 years

What are you using PS3 for most at the moment? Do you have a favourite game?

The only three games I've actually played are Resistance, F1 and MotorStorm, I do go online about once a week, usually on a Sunday to get the updates for the system so I've got the latest system software. My daughter who is 12, she uses it all the time to go online and download demos.

GPS, Go! Messenger, and the TV Tuner are all new kinds of features for PlayStation, can you tell us more about them?

I think the team in new products development have done extremely well to get these three new key features to market. From research, what we know is that people wanted to be able to use PSP for GPS and we decided that the best way to do it was to do it ourselves. You saw in Leipzig the demonstration of how well it works, and it should be on the market in the New Year.

The second thing is video downloads. Again consumers have said it would be nice if they could have a portable system where they could get video downloads. So what we've done is we've linked up with Sky to offer that, initially just in the UK, but we're hoping then to roll that out with other partners into other European countries.

And the third thing of course is Go! Messenger with BT. This BT deal is not just restricted to the UK. It will start in the UK early in 2008 and BT are confident that they can roll it out to other parts of Europe, maybe the Middle East and certainly Australia.

Can you explain the PS3 TV tuner to us?

Here in the UK its called Freeview but it's digital terrestrial TV - this is what we're going to be incorporating into PS3 through the TV Tuner. You're going to be able to hook up your PS3 and watch digital TV through it and you're also going o be able to use your hard drive to store programmes to watch later and pause, fast forward and rewind live TV. I think what's going to happen is that current PS3 owners will actually buy it, but later I think people will realise that it's a compelling reason to buy a PS3 in the first place.

What do you think is the biggest challenge for the upcoming year?