Sony's David Reeves

I have to say it's not top of mind - we don't really think about it. We look at our numbers and we see our numbers growing. I think that Microsoft got some impetus from GTA IV. They got some impetus but they've fallen back since then, and I think they will continue along that strategy of trying to get exclusives from third parties and promote that. We anticipate that, but we still feel that we have our own IPs that we call our "landing lights" that people are just going to go for.

In an ideal world I think you're right, that we've got to get more to day-and-date. When the US launch, we could launch in Australia and we could launch in New Zealand and the UK, but if we did that then our colleagues in Italy and France and Germany and Spain would not be very happy, so we've chosen to stick to the strategy of doing it pan-European and pan-Australia and New Zealand.

But I think that we're going to find with some of the ones that I announced tonight that they're going to be much, much closer. There might be two of three days between them but we want to get them closer on pricing as well.

Not consciously, no. I don't feel it. I think that some of these things would have gone exactly the same way if Phil Harrison had been there.

Phil Harrison's legacy is very, very positive. He pioneered SingStar, EyeToy, Buzz, and when he saw LittleBigPlanet for the first time he said "we've got to have that", so I would say Phil is 99.9 percent positive in terms of his legacy.

Some of the games that you talk about - Eight Days and things like that - I think he would have said it's gone on too long as well. I think it's just coincidence that that's happened.

As Jack [Tretton] said yesterday [during SCEA's conference], it went down a track that maybe had too high a set of ideals relating to non-gaming and we've come back now and said we're going to focus now simply on games.

If we're going to focus on games launching from Home, building some really good Trophy systems, then we have to involve the third parties. If we're going to involve the third parties, they have to have an SDK. That meant we were really taking one pace back, two paces forward all the time, and we had to take a pace to get the SDK out, to involve the third parties, to make sure that when it came out with gaming it was 100 percent on the open beta.

I've seen it over the last 2-3 weeks and I'm happy that it's going to work.

Yeah, it looks a lot better than it did. I shouldn't say it "looks a lot better"; it now is for gamers, where gamers can hang out and can launch things, and they want to be able to launch third-party titles as well, and that meant going back, doing a lot more programming and getting the SDK out.

Yep. We thought we might sell it to Microsoft to put it in Powerpoint.

[Laughing]

It's a way to do it, isn't it? You never know. It's the kind of crazy thing that Microsoft might say, "Yeah okay Sony, we'll do that." Considering how much we pay for all the stuff we put onto Vaios for them.