MAXCONSOLE - XBOX 360 - Sony: MS failed to capitalize on headstart

“In three years certain systems will look pretty long in the tooth graphically if not look like they’re extremely dated.” Later he says, “Wii is on a different trajectory completely and I’m not exactly sure what that will look like in two or three years time. The technology that’s under that hood is so different from ours and I think the jury is still out.”

What I really want are the specific projections of when PS3 will cross the Xbox 360 line.

“In the years ahead our games will begin to distance themselves from other next-gen games, our games being first-party exclusives. As our teams work on third generation software, you’ll see games begin to tip the scale at thirty gigs, forty gigs, fifty gigs. You can’t possibly fit that on HD-DVD unless you want to do the old floppy disk swaps of years past.

“So that immersion quality will also begin to distance itself from our competition. We’ve got 2,300 people in our development core, building great content. That focus and dedication is unparalleled with any other first party company. Our first-party games will lead the way.

“So in soft qualitative terms there will be a big distance created by PS3 from the other two platforms in two or three years. I think most analysts, the Michael Pachters of this world, have curved the PS3 business to create distance in ’08 and ’09 so two, three years out, I think most pundits have pointed to the PS3 as starting to create, separate itself from the other two.”

Is there a chart on the wall in his office where the PlayStation 3 crosses the Xbox 360 install base line?

“Well no, but we do look at how closely 360 is indexed off of Xbox and for the good chunk of 2007 it was fairly close to where Xbox was year to year.

“The time that they had to create huge distance and build a massive install base before the PS3 could really take root; that opportunity is over and there’s no real capitalization of it. They had a great crescendo moment with Halo and it helped catapult them into a pretty strong position towards the back end of last year, but they were still within a stone’s throw of where they were with the original Xbox.

“To me that speaks of a failure to broaden their reach beyond the core first person shooter player who was in their back pocket for Xbox. The question for us is ‘are they really going after the PS2 demographic? Are they stealing share from us?’ And the answer is no.”

It is clearly an article of faith at Sony that the PS2 hordes are just waiting for the right moment to assert their dedication to The Brand, and join the party. “The PlayStation fan continues to be loyal to the PlayStation brand. We see huge overlap on PS3 ownership and PSP ownership and PS2 ownership. So we continue to put in the bank millions of PS2 owners who are ripe for upgrading to PS3 at the right point in time.

“That’s the secret weapon, that’s what goes unreported. It’s this 41 million universe of PS2 owners that will be targeted very, very soon to upgrade to a PS3 Blu-ray machine."