Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, David Reeves talked about the future of Sony Computer Entertainment. In particular, while the PS3 is currently trailing the Xbox 360 in market penetration, Reeves believes that Sony's console will catch up in the long run.
"I don't think it will be next year, but in three to five years it will become dominant on the market," said Reeves to GI.biz. "The legacy will be that people will see a tortoise and hare situation. In a way, in the end it will be a dead heat. People will say PS3 took a while to get going but it really caught up very quickly and confounded many of the critics from the first year," he said of the consoles position on the market.
"When I see the line-up ahead, when I see what's lined up on the new product side, I'm very, very optimistic for what I see for PlayStation's future in the PAL territories," he added.
Reeves is very conscious of the criticisms leveled against SCEE, particularly of the PS3's high price, but feels that the PlayStation format is a strong one in the European market. "Europe and PAL markets normally have to launch last and that stirs up a lot of criticism," noted Reeves. "And normally we have to launch with a currency that's quite strong and therefore the price is quite high, and again we get a lot of criticism for that. And we have to maintain that. And that, in the last three to four years, has made it extremely difficult. But even so, we as a PAL market are the leading region for all of those formats, despite those difficulties."
Reeves is the outgoing president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. He managed various Sony offices in Europe and helped launched the PlayStation in the region after joining the company in 1995. "The lasting legacy is that I took Sony Computer Entertainment through the harder years but still managed to keep PlayStation as a very prominent brand in all PAL territories, both for PlayStation 2, PSP and PlayStation 3," he said.
While Reeves was rumored to be going to Realtime Worlds, developer of Crackdown and the upcoming APB, he denied any such offer. He won't discount returning to the industry, but mentioned no particular plans. "I'm actually retiring and my ambition is over the next couple of months is to get some rest because it's been a very tough year," said Reeves. "And then I'm just going to try and do some things that I've always wanted to do in the past. Some of those might be in the games industry, but what I'm saying is I'll try and do several things. I honestly don't have any concrete plans, I'm not going anywhere. You won't see me on May 1 with a new company."
