Friday, August 18, 2006

PS3 still on track says Sony's Hirai


Thor Thorsen interviewed Sony Computer Entertainment American president Kaz Hirai for GameSpot.

On the topic of launch date:

GS: How are things looking there?

KH: Everything's pretty much on track. I just came back from Las Vegas where we we're still actually having our internal sales and merchandisers gather for basically four or five days of intense meetings. Everything from retail strategy to talking about the interactives, and how you can reboot it if your power goes out, so everything from nuts to bolts all the way up to the retail strategy. So we're internally really getting geared up to go to market with this beautiful console in three months' time, and at this point in time all signs are good to go.

On the topic of potential shortages:

GS: The 360 was plagued by significant shortages at launch. What steps are you taking to make sure the PS3 doesn't meet the same fate?

KH: Well, I think that you know this is all relative, but you need to put it in context. I think that we've always talked about shipping 2 million units worldwide within the calendar year. Since we're going with three territories, we haven't really come up with an allocation just yet. But even if you do the simple math you're talking about less than 700,000 units per territory, per major territory, between launch and the end of the year. So even if there was some fluctuation--you give Japan more, you give the US more, what have you--you're going to end up with some shortages. So I think that if we've done our jobs right and if we've been able to really have the consumers become interested in this product, then, unfortunately, I think it's going to be very much of a challenge to be able to meet every single unit demand that's out there in the market. That's just a logistical impossibility. Unless we suddenly say, "Well we want to wait until June of next year to launch because we want to stockpile product," I don't think that's the approach we want to take.

Read the entire interview linked here at Gamespot.

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