Sony says 360 and Wii owners will upgrade to PS3

Andrew House, the president of SCE Europe, has suggested that owners of current consoles such as Wii and Xbox 360 will ‘upgrade’ to a PS3 in an effort to keep track of the technology offered by Sony’s machine.

If you look back at previous lifecycles, like PS2 versus N64, we have lots of data that suggests that lots of people bought into N64 as their entry level gaming device, and were happy to upgrade to a more powerful machine later in the lifecycle when the price point was right for them,” House told OPM, according to Edge.

I think we’re going to see this later on PS3, and the fact that it’s a Blu-ray player as well and that there’s a greater wealth of network based experiences than are perhaps available on the device they already have will add to the proposition. I think that will definitely be a factor in the marketplace.”

House went on to mirror the similar sentiments recently expressed by rivals by stating that his machine could be around for a lot longer than had forst been thought.

There are a few things that drive this to a significantly longer than ten-year lifecycle for me,” he explained.

One is the traditional market dynamic that as prices come down you build down and out through the pyramid to a new type of consumer, and the motion controller we showed – and gave a firm release date on – changes the experience and allows us to bring in a new audience.

And then over that there’s the network offering and a different way – and PSPgo is another aspect of that – for consumers to consume content. All three of those give us a tremendously strong opportunity to really build that platform lifecycle up over the long term.”