SCEA's Peter Dille talks about the PS3's price cut, PlayStation Home, and reducing costs, saying that the continued price cut will be determined by the sales from world-wide sales in July.

He also goes on to say that "Home is clear proof that we’re leapfrogging the competition and seeing something that you’ll never see on [Xbox 360]."

Sony’s not in the clear yet. June NPD US hardware sales (i.e., prior to the drop) showed that PS3 unit sales were a modest 98,500. And we’ve yet to see if the increased sales are sustainable or if they’re merely a temporary blip. “The whole world will be able to see the results when the July [NPD] charts come out,” says a confident Dille.

Now we just have to wait and see if the $500 price point is one that will last.

“When you talk about online gaming, yeah there’ll be many things that are the same [as Xbox Live]. We’re going to deliver online games and tournaments and rankings and things like that.

“But I think Home is clear proof that we’re leapfrogging the competition and seeing something that you’ll never see on [Xbox 360]. We’re not trying to mimic what they’re doing and again, even coming from a business model standpoint, we’re not charging consumers a toll to get online to play games.”

The menu-driven Xbox Live interface compared to the more immersive apartments and virtual living areas of Home are completely different, and one service is likely to appeal more to differing types of gamers than the other, depending on what consumers want from an online gaming experience.

Just as important as getting consumers excited over a product is getting developers excited. “When the PlayStation Network was in its infancy, it was just boring, it wasn’t where it needs to be and still today there are improvements that we’ll continually work on to make it a better network.

“We need to do a better job on is this notion of community and we’re not really getting that out of the PlayStation Network yet, so I think when third party developers saw Home they were really excited…There’s a lot of development going on their side to tie into what we’re doing.”

Final Blade via next-gen.biz »