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SCMP Reporter

Sony hopes to sell 100,000 PlayStation 2 (PS2) consoles in Asia in the next three months now that the gaming system has made its official debut in the region.

By lowering the price of the game consoles and titles, Sony believes it can lure new users.

The console being sold in Hong Kong is priced at HK$1,980 and is equipped with CD and DVD functions. The grey-market price is about HK$2,600.

'We want to lower the price as much as we can,' said Tetsuhiko Yasuda, managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment.

'It would be easier for people in Hong Kong and other Asian countries to buy the software because it is probably a bit expensive. We would also like to compete against parallel imports by lowering the price.'

The gaming system was officially released in Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore earlier this month - more than a year after it was made available in Japan and the United States.

'I am aware of the fact that many people are already playing the parallel-imported product, but I am sure there would be many new users to buy the official products,' Mr Yasuda said.

'We would like to aim at light users who are not very familiar with games and tell them what this official PlayStation is.'

He said PS2 had been selling well in Japan, claiming a console could be found in half of all Japanese households.

PS2 will be launched in Taiwan on January 24.

Sony expects Hong Kong to have the strongest sales in the region. About 20 million units have been sold worldwide and about 20,000 to 30,000 consoles were being made each month.

The company said the late release of PS2 was partly due to the limited titles available when it was launched a year ago.

'We could only bring a few out of the Japanese titles. We had to wait a while until we could bring some big titles into the territory,' Mr Yasuda said.

He said the high-profile launch of PS2 was a move to increase awareness to combat piracy, which had severely hurt the game developers.

'Software makers are being greatly affected because whatever they make, they can find the pirated copy in Hong Kong and other Asian markets. That problem will not be solved if people still buy the pirated copies. So what we would like to do is to advertise the official release of the products,' he said.

Despite efforts by the Hong Kong Government to control software piracy, PlayStation counterfeit games are on sale in many local shopping malls with prices as low as HK$5.

Mr Yasuda said the quality of pirated software could never compete with that of the official product.

'We would like to tell users that the content is very important - not the price or how cheap you can make the software, but the actual content inside,' he said.

He said local software developers might be invited to design games for PlayStation, but only if the piracy problem was eliminated.

With increasing competition from Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube, analysts believe an updated version of PlayStation, perhaps PlayStation 3, would be launched soon.

'There is probably a plan to make PlayStation 3 but all products we make in the future depend upon the demand of users,' Mr Yasuda said.

'We would like to see what demand we get and then make a product according to that demand.'

The Japanese game giant has no plans to introduce PS2 to the mainland.

'We are not currently thinking about that, but after we launch it in Hong Kong and Taiwan, we may think about launching it in China. But we do not have any plans at the moment,' Mr Yasuda said.



Sony sets high hopes on PS2 consoles