Interviews// Ray Maguire - Sony Computer Entertainment's UK Managing Director

SPOnG: I’ve seen reports of RRPS of €599 in mainland Europe and €629 in Ireland. Are those accurate?

RM: Those are accurate, yes. We’re still working out the implications in Scandinavia as well, where there are non-Euro accounts.

SPOnG: Would you not have liked, for psychological reasons more than anything else, to have got the price below £400?

RM: I’d love to have done.

SPOnG: Don’t you think £399 would have been good, because it will be around that price in Europe?

RM: Again, if the Euro goes down to 0.66 or 0.65 – I remember the Euro at 0.64 – that certainly won’t be the case, because we’ll be around where we are now. What you’re doing is what a lot of people do, because we’re freezing a trade price, but you’re making something else variable, which is not relevant to how we live in the UK. Otherwise we would have varying price for McDonalds or Starbucks, where all those things are doing is reflecting the cost of living in the UK versus the cost of living somewhere else. 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.

SPOnG: One way of getting around the price controversy would be to bring the 20Gb PS3 over. Why won’t there be any 20Gb PS3s at launch?

RM: The response that we’re getting back from the marketplace – not only from retail, but also from consumers – is that what they really want is the best. They want to go for the wireless model; they do understand that the PlayStation 3 is a machine which has a lot of downloads available right from day one, and that 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 as well. 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. It makes distribution much more efficient and allows us to get more product out to consumers.

SPOnG: Reports are coming from the US about readily available 60Gb PS3s, whereas the 20Gb models are like gold-dust. That must be worrying Sony?

RM: That’s not my territory, so you need to ask someone in the US. That’s not necessarily what we’re hearing – we’re hearing there are pockets of stock where distribution was not quite as smooth as it could have been, because everything was hand-to-mouth and they were just getting stock out as fast as they could for Christmas. There will be some distribution ups and downs.

Hopefully, we won’t have so much of that, but you can never guarantee that when you have limited stock, you’ll have that stock in absolutely the right place. I know that the US is still screaming for stock, which it’s not getting, because they’re supplying us.

The other thing you’ve got to remember is that the UK machine is a dedicated SKU, so we have to have manufacture which is separate from the rest of the PAL territories.