Peter Dille: PS3 Business Will See 'Tremendous Acceleration'
Immediately after SCEA officially announced the new 40GB model for $399, GameDaily BIZ got on the phone with Senior Vice President of Marketing Peter Dille. He expects the new price point to make a huge impact. We also discussed controlling leaks, backwards compatibility, Blu-ray momentum and more.
* PD: I haven't seen the September data yet and obviously it won't reflect any of the momentum that we have with this announcement. But to answer your question, we expect tremendous acceleration in the PS3 business following this move; it's why we're doing it. And bear in mind that this isn't just a price reduction based on slow sales. We've engineered a new hardware unit to get to this lower price point. But again, I think it's also important to bear in mind that this new 40GB maintains all the core functionality of the PS3 experience. In other words, we don't have models some of which have a hard drive and some of which don't or some that have Blu-ray and some that don't. Every PS3, no matter what model you have, has Cell technology, has a Blu-ray drive built in, features Wi-Fi, free online gaming; that core experience remains unchanged.
And we expect that $399 opens up the PS3 experience to a whole new audience of people... there's basically a $50 price gap between the $399 unit and the 360's closest comparable unit. And for $50 more you get Blu-ray, you get PS3's free online gaming vs. paying a subscription with a monthly fee. Out of the box, I think the pendulum swings in the PlayStation's favor. What I can tell you, although we won't make predictions on how many we can sell week one, what I can point to is that in the U.K. when they made the introduction of their 40GB their business was up more than 170 percent, right out of the gate.
Price is a significant component here, but the other thing we're very excited about is our lineup of games. We feel we have a great holiday lineup. That combined with the [new price] I think really opens up the PS3 to a very broad audience.
* BIZ: Well, I'm very curious to see how November and December turn out with this new price point.
* PD: November is going to be a great month. We'll have a full month of sales for the 40GB; we'll have Ratchet out in the marketplace, which is just a beautiful game; Uncharted will be out a little later in November; sales of Warhawk and Heavenly Sword are still going strong; Folklore was just released. Again, we've got this very broad portfolio of games to hit the many different gaming tastes, and we think that's going to be significant, as well as the ability to play Blu-ray movies and to tap into all the multimedia functionality that the PS3 offers. We think the holidays is going to be when all this stuff is going to really kick into high gear.
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