PS3 to dominate in 3-5 years, says Reeves

Outgoing Sony Europe president David Reeves has said it will take the PS3 years to win the console war - but he reckons it WILL win, oh yes.

"I don't think it will be next year, but in three to five years it will become dominant on the market," he told GamesIndustry.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."

Reeves was speaking while putting his favourite pen and the framed picture of PaRappa the Rapper in a cardboard box, as today is his last day at Sony. He's been with the company since 1995 and it's been a rollercoaster ride.

"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," said Reeves.

"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."

It hasn't been easy, though: "Europe and PAL markets normally have to launch last and that stirs up a lot of criticism. 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 that, in the last three to four years, has made it extremely difficult," Reeves said.

"But even so, we as a PAL market are the leading region for all of those formats, despite those difficulties."

According to Reeves things can only get better: "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."

Look out for a special roundup of Reeves' best ever quotes on Eurogamer later today.