Sony UK boss "would dearly love" PS3 to be under £400

SCE's UK managing director Ray Maguire has been speaking to The Guardian about the company's reasoning behind the £425 RRP of PlayStation 3.

"There's a compulsion within the media to look at everything as a snapshot, and do a calculation, normally based on just the RRP in somewhere like the US and just do the RRP in the UK. What you should do with the RRP from the US is add sales tax," he said.

Maguire argues that comparing RRPs is too simplistic an approach, due to exchange rate considerations: "When business trade, they hedge. It depends what currency you're buying against. We don't buy anything in dollars, so the dollar can go up and down.

"If it were $1.40 to the pound as it as a while ago, then the PS3 would be a bargain compared to the US; if it's anything more than that, the UK price appears to be comparatively expensive. But we're dealing with Euros and Yen - it's about the relationship between those currencies."

Any plans for a lower price at some point? "Of course, I would dearly love to have the PlayStation 3 RRP under £400, and at such time as we can afford to do so, we will."

Answering the question of why there aren't any 20GB PS3s at the UK launch, Maguire said it was a consumer led decision, "They want to put their own media on it from day one. So a big preference has been shown towards the 60GB model. And when we look at the sales figures from both Japan and the US, that's reflected at retail. You can either have not enough of both in the marketplace for day one, or you can have round about the right amount of one."

via cvg