In a Reuters report, SCE CEO Kaz Hirai has said he is confident of being able to ship 11 million PS3s by the end of the fiscal year, i.e. end of March 2008. In order to help drive hardware sales, Sony aren’t ruling out more acquisitions of developers like the recent Evolution and BigBig announcement.
Hirai: We wouldn’t buy a company just because we can…only when a company has tight relations with us…and it can churn out strong software titles.
This does ring true given Hirai’s previous statements regarding the lack of a price-cut at TGS, where he stated that without enough AAA titles to backup a price-cut he wasn’t sure it would have the desired impact.
So, it looks like we’ll be waiting until Spring for a cheaper PS3, which might coincide with the launch of software such as Home and LittleBigPlanet. AAA enough to help shift 5.5 million PS3s by March 2008?
Time will tell.