During an interview with Impress Watch, a Japanese website, the head honcho of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), Ken Kutaragi, has made it abundantly clear that he sees the PlayStation 3 as being a computer system, rather than a pure gaming console.
“We don’t say it’s a game console. PlayStation 3 is clearly a computer, unlike the PlayStations so far.” — Kutaragi (2006)
One of the main reasons for holding this view appears to be the that the PlayStation 3 will allow greater modification than the previous consoles. As such, different generations will be likely to feature somewhat different specifications than earlier consoles. This can clearly be connected to the Revolved.net article of the 5th of June, where Izumi Kawanishi discussed the possibility of additional hard disks and network capabilites.
Kutaragi developed on Kawanishi’s interview:
“As the PlayStation 3 is a computer, it also wants to evolve. We’ll want to upgrade the HDD size very soon - if new standards appear on the PC, we will want to support them. We may want the [Blu-ray] drive to [have a writable version upgrade].” — Kutaragi (2006)
All the above indicates that while Sony are suggesting that they are confident that the PlayStation 3 will compete with the Nintendo Wii in terms of gaming capabilities, they are desperate to re-market and innovate in order to gain some of the various markets in which the Wii might lose out.
Interesting…
I wonder what Sir Howard Stringer, the new CEO of Sony (worldwide) has to say about this. I haven’t heard a word from him ever since the lawsuit by Immersion Corporation over the DualShock controller.
[…] What we know: the PlayStation 3 release date has been confirmed by Sony Computer Entertainment as being November 17th, 2006. The company has also been frank about the seemingly high price band we are to expect to have to pay for the console (or should we say, the computer) - $499 and $599 (pricing in USD) for the 20GB and 60GB versions respectively. […]