This is the second part of the three part interview series with Mr. Atindriya Bose, the Country Manager of Sony Computer Entertainment, India.
GG: Ray Maguire had said that early adopters of the PS3 may have felt cheated. Do you second that?
AB: It is not like that. Anyone who is in the technology zone or an early technology adopter would know that high end technology products have only one direction to go. Very rarely do you see the prices of technology products going up. As the volumes grow, as the productions grow, there are learning cycles, there are savings that come out and you will always say that like any electronic product, getting reprised downward and it is true just for PlayStation 3, it is true for computers, it is true for televisions, and it is true for LCDs.
The first Plasma TV that was launched in India was selling at 8 lacs. Does that mean the person who has bought it feels cheated now because it is being sold at 1 lac? No. Everyone makes his own choice, so I don’t think anyone is getting cheated. People take a very concentrated view. Consumers are not dumb, they are pretty smart people. They do value proposition and make up a purchased decision.
GG: The Xbox 360 console is cheaper and has more games. How will PS3 counter that?
AB: Every product, I will not put it as it is cheaper than PlayStation or the PlayStation is costlier than that. I think each has its own price point and we are planning our own price point, on the basis of the value that we give to our consumers, on the basis of the product package. Compare Apple to Apple. In terms of the hardware, you cannot say PlayStation 3 should be of the same price as the Xbox 360 s there are certain features that we have, which they do not have, which is a Blu-Ray disc, which is important, like if you want to have a high definition entertainment at your home. There is a 60GB hard drive, which is a media manager for something that you can use for media managing.
So all these features add on and then you figure out a price point, which is the value that the consumers are paying. Internationally there are high numbers of people, who have adopted Playstation 3, so obviously they are realizing those values, and the attaching value to it. The same is happening in India, like no product, yes they are our competition because it is a gaming console thing but no product is costlier or cheaper in anyway, every product is rightly priced in their own merit and you just have to figure out the value proposition, why it should be priced in a particular way.
GG: But some of these services are not available in India, like the internet infrastructure is not that good and also there is fewer choice of titles on the Blu-Ray…
AB: There are certain things that you have to look as market realities. First is that we take the Blu-Ray disc part. The Blu-ray disc is available; it may not be in the right quantity in India. Sony Pictures are distributing Blu-Ray disc. The Superman Blu-Ray disc is coming into the market. They already have 20 – 25 Blu-Ray disc titles that are in the market, so it is available. Other players are the publishing houses and studios who are also introducing Blu-Ray discs. So it may be like PlayStation 3 has come into this market, the software guys will move in their own right. I cannot comment on their strategy. We don’t do the software. But the products are available and the amount of offtake of Blu-Ray discs. I say this because internally I am with Sony Pictures, I am in touch as I sit in the same office so I know that they are selling good quantity of Blu-Ray discs in India.
The second is Internet connectivity. If connectivity is an issue, yes it is an issue in India and that’s a reality not just for us but it is an equal amount of reality for Xbox who has launched Xbox Live. It is an equally problematic area for any of the internet audience but at the same time look at it how the market is maturing. Today you are capsuling me in a video. You are an online website, you will be put it up on your portal. You are no longer bothered about the connectivity or the download. You have optimized yourself to suit the Indian thing and as broadband comes, you will only go better. So we also take care of realities and there is always a start and as the system, the Indian infrastructure goes better, we will focus on those parts of the product like the PlayStation Network, the online part of the games, everything! But we do not hold back anything.
GG: But there is is not much awareness about the PlayStation games. In fact, many people in India do not know about PlayStation games such as Heavenly Sword or Ratchet & Clank.
AB: This is perhaps a chicken and egg story. The market has a potential every console maker and every publisher has recognized. At the same time, it is still in a stage of nascency, whether it is because we could have moved from 2000 and done enough amount of marketing between ours or all our competition, like everyone does some amount of marketing. People become more clued into the segment, yes but the top end of the audience, gamers, if they look at any of the blogging site, that I think you also manage a very important blogging section, you put that question in the blogging section, everyone knows. I don’t think you will get a no. They know sometimes more than I do.
So the people who are up there, they know. Now is the time for marketing, so this knowledge base goes down and slowly trickles down in a phase wise manner. As the market grows, as our marketing becomes more aggressive, the balance between the hardware and the software marketing comes in, people will be more clued in and people will come to know about much faster. Maybe a year down the line, there will be more number of people, who will perhaps call up and ask me when are you launching or when is India seeing this software, when is this genre of game coming in, when is the next SingStar Bollywood coming in. Thy will be more clued in. So this is a market growth phenomenon.
GG: What if Nintendo decides to bring in the Wii and the DS in India? How will Sony counter that?
AB: First thing from my side is that, we will not counter it. We will welcome Nintendo. We welcome any of the competition who want to move into the India market, because more the merrier, in terms of the publishing house, in terms of the consoles, more the merrier because the size of the pie is enormous, no point on fighting over the bean, we have been able to edge out in the Indian market. Similarly, when Xbox does marketing or when PlayStation does marketing. I am regularly in touch with the Microsoft people. We compete in our own way in the retail channel but we welcome each other’s move, because the whole pie will get pushed up. The market is not in the stage of saturation that I will be afraid of the competition coming in.
The other part of it is, you have heard of Wii because it is very active and actually play table tennis and you can actually play these games, if you have a Nintendo console, it sounds very attractive. We have a same genre of game that we will be rolling out, you have seen SingStar. You will very soon see a game which is of the genre of EyeToy. So, you can jump into that game, very fast and you stand in front of the TV, there are activities to do. You can do your fitness regime; you can actually play the games through your body actions. Everything that has perhaps come to you about Wii is there in EyeToy and incidentally EyeToy came in much before this part of the competition came in.
GG: SingStar Bollywood. Is it targeted at Indian gamers or NRI gamers living abroad?
AB: Both. Currently if I talk about Indian gamers, the base is very small. Like none of the games developed solely for India will justify the investment that you are making. But at the same time, when you are developing it, you definitely keep in mind the impact it will have on the Indians in the different parts of the world. You are looking at Indians, you are not looking at India. Its role for Indians in India is perhaps different from the role it plays for the Indians in the UK or the Middle East or the US. Because they are expat gamers, because they are more matured gamers, they come from a more matured gaming economy. In ours, this is very important because it allows people to jump in to the game, experience a Playstation game in a way they want to experience this game and in a way they are habituated to experience this game, which is singing and competing, creating a ‘Voice of India’, creating a SingStar competition at home.
At the same time, you look at the hunger for this sort of content for the UK Indians is huge. There had been a lot of regional language released, like we have launched it recently in India, Middle East and UK. The day one order for SingStar Bollywood has surpassed many other regional languages, many other regional European languages to the extent that the development team already is in talks with me saying like what next, what are the genres that we should look at.
GG: So there will be a SingStar Tamil or SingStar Bengali…
AB: I don’t know if it will go into the regional language, the opportunity is obviously there but even in Bollywood, thirty songs of Bollywood, I don’t think defines Bollywood. There can be SingStar Bollywood 1, 2, 3, 4. I think it can be hundred. It can be SingStar Bollywood Legends, it can be SingStar Bollywood Actors, Actresses, singer names, you name it. Bollywood is all about music.
GG: So the game is playable on PS3?
AB: Yes it is…
(To be continued…)