Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, is always willing and eager to give his take on the PS3, and recently commented on some of the state of affairs regarding the PS3. His comments were made to NextGen.
There has been some confusion over the real launch numbers of PS3s headed for North America, and Hirai set the record straight by giving a solid figure and timetable. He stated, “For day one, we are going to have a total 400,000 units for the launch period only for North America, and we expect to have about one million units by the end of the calendar year. These are some pretty aggressive numbers.”
High profile titles such as Call of Duty 3, Tony Hawk,s Project 8, and Metal Gear Solid 4 are expected to be some of the many titles that will be available on the PS3 launch day, and the total number of launch titles have been estimated somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty titles. Hirai nailed down the real figures and indicated that the number would fall short of this figure:
“For launch day there is going to be a bit less than 20. For the launch window there is going to be a bit more. We are looking at the portfolio of the third party publishers for the launch day, and we are asking them which titles are going to be available for the second week, which ones are going to be available for the third week, and which titles are going to be for the end of the year. Basically we are managing the portfolio of the software titles everybody has, once this process is done we are deciding which titles are going where, and then we are going to have the final list of the launch titles for the US launch."
“With any console launch, launch titles aren,t fully known until several weeks before launch. Once that,s settled, we are going to announce the final list for the titles available at day one.”
Hirai then spoke about the online capabilities of the PS3 and what sort of content will be available for the machine. “…you will be able to downloading music content, video content–and when we say video content we are not talking about motion pictures only, but other video content as well like promotional trailers, interviews with artists, all those different kinds of video materials. The list will grow as we expand the service and those things are going to be available as soon as you take your PlayStation 3 out of the box.”
