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Sony's Ray Maguire

"3D is an early adopter market."

Eurogamer You've sold 38.1 million PS3s globally. But how's it doing in the UK?
Ray Maguire

It's done really well. A lot of people thought the price was not sustainable. Re-designing and putting it out as a Slim gave it a boost and it's stable. So it stayed at the boost level, which is an increase. This year, as you'll see from Chart-Track, we're on a positive growth yet again.

When we look at the business from a Chart-Track basis or from a retail basis we see one story. When we have a look at the whole package, when we look at the entire spectrum of PlayStation services, it's absolutely clear we're doing something right and people are either enjoying our product for an entertainment experience as opposed to just a games experience.

Eurogamer Are PS3 exclusive games better now than they were when the PS3 launched? Would you agree with that?
Ray Maguire

Yeah. There's a huge amount of technology in the PS3 and that gives games designers choice. It was reasonably difficult at the beginning to decide on how you make those choices. But it's been around for three years now, and what we're seeing is people have got used to what choices they make.

We've seen some true innovation from the studios, whether it be first party or third party. That's what we're enjoying now.

I also think there's been a reference to how people play their games and what they like out of games as well. Something like LittleBigPlanet, truly innovative game in the first place, but with true references to user generated content. It's an important part, whether it be creating or using.

Eurogamer Some PS3 owners complain that the European PlayStation Store isn't as good as the US PlayStation Store. Is that something you're working on?
Ray Maguire

Yeah. About a year ago there was a reasonable difference between the two stores. The guys have spent a lot of time over the last year making that much closer together.

The fact is we have many different languages and it's a bigger task than it is having a very large single language store. As I said, they've made major inroads on doing that. I'm sure they'll continue to do that as well.

A showcase of games using PlayStation Move.
Eurogamer You recently launched the paid for subscription service, PlayStation Plus. How's it doing now the dust is settling?
Ray Maguire

I'm not sure the dust is settling. With all these things there's a huge amount of work that goes on when you launch anything new. One of those is trying to define user feedback and understand what people want. And then we have to tailor our services based on the information we get, which is exactly what we do.

We will be tweaking and adjusting the service and trying to get the best value out for consumers for a long time yet. It will grow and evolve like everything we do, just as everything the PlayStation's ever done has evolved.

You think about the cross media bar now compared to where it started three years ago. The same will apply to any service or any platform we bring.

Eurogamer Some of the feedback we've seen on PlayStation Plus is that users feel they're not getting value for their money. How do you feel about that?
Ray Maguire

I'm not sure we're getting exactly the same feedback on that. What happens is that in many cases, if you're looking on blogs etc, people will post negative elements but will rarely put positive elements on there because there's no reason for them to want to. So sometimes that can be skewed.

When we have a look at the data, there's always going to be people who've got issues. We have to look at what percentage those are. Whatever it is, even if it's a small percentage, then we try and find a solution to make sure no-one has an issue. But again, there has to be some context in there as well.