Sony Not Bothered by Wii, Xbox 360

Nintendo and Microsoft are poised to give Sony some honest-to-god competition, but that is not fazing the company.

With less than six weeks to go before the debut of the PlayStation 3, it seems that things are at last starting to come together for Sony. The company is rounding off development on launch titles, and it is defiant that the competition simply does not matter.

Sony's Phil Harrison confirmed to MCV that Resistance: Fall of Man and Genji: Days of the Blade will both launch with the console in November. (The console launches in mid November in the US and Japan, though the European release has been pushed back to March 2007.)

Harrison admitted that development isn't quite done yet on launch games. "But we're close," he told MCV. Launch games are currently in various stages of bug testing.

Getting the games ready is one thing, but Sony's real problem has been in securing the parts needed to put together the complex console - especially the Blu-ray drive at its core.

"Right now, [production of the PlayStation 3] is an issue," Sony's Ken Kutaragi told MCV, "because we can't manufacture enough blue laser diodes for our PlayStation 3s. But we will resolve that."

Good. But what about Nintendo and Microsoft?

Nintendo is launching its Wii at around the same time as the PlayStation 3, and that machine costs nearly half the price of the PlayStation 3. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been wading in the next-generation pool for nearly a year. The company says it will have sold 10 million Xbox 360s by the end of the year.

Kutaragi is blunt about the competition: "We do not care."

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo