According to Sony America boss Jack Tretton, the company is preparing to expand their PlayStation business further into South America, marketing their consoles more in Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay.
The company hopes to make $750 million USD in regional sales for the fiscal 2009 year.
At the same time, Tretton added that the PlayStation Network now has 24 million accounts worldwide, but a small number from South America.
Moving to more general facts, Tretton applauded the aging PS2, which still manages to make brisk sales despite being almost a decade old. Tretton says 100 titles will be released for the console in 2009.
Result for: boss
In an effort to fight back against the recent Danish ISP Block of its site, The Pirate Bay has launched jesperbay.org as a countermeasure.
The new site, named after the boss of the Danish IFPI, gives Danish users detailed instructions on how to get around the block and gain access again to The Pirate Bay.
One of the admins of TPB, Brokep, had this to say about the new domain name. “We’ll associate his name with something positive instead of his negative IFPI vibe.”
The admin team over at TPB has also asked other torrent site admins to help by redirecting all customers from the blocked ISP Tele2 to the Jesper Bay. The team even wrote a piece of code that can redirect all Tele2 users to the Jesper Bay so they can change their DNS.
The ruling which has caused the block was released last night and ruled that Tele2 “assists in copyright infringement” simply because they give their customers access to TPB. The ruling should result in more ISP blocks, and the IFPI has already announced that they will start similar cases in Norway and Finland.
Sebastian Gjerding, a spokesperson for the Danish pro-piracy lobby Piratgruppen, made an interesting quote after the ruling was read. “It’s very frightening that the IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry.”
Result for: boss
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) UK boss Ray Maguire has said that Sony must work harder on promoting the cross-platform functionality between its home console, the PlayStation 3 (PS3) and the PlayStation Portable (PSP). When the PS3 was first launched, more emphasis was put on the functionality between the two devices than now, as the focus has moved more towards the game line-up than PS3 features in order to boost sales.
“When we first started - because all the functionality [on the PS3] was radical - we talked about that functionality,” he told GamesIndustry.biz last month. “And in doing that, maybe we weren’t strong enough on the games side of it. Now, with the strength of the games we’ve got coming out, this Christmas we’re definitely about the games. From our own first party, and also third party, there’s a feast of games for PS3 this year.”
He continued: “At the same time though, because we’ve been out for a couple of years now, people are starting to understand and discover the functionality of things like PlayTV, and that’s created the desire for people to upgrade to larger hard disk sizes. I just recently put a 320GB drive in mine. I think people are starting to come to grips with that, but what’s probably lesser known is the relationship between PS3 and PSP and the Remote Play functionality.”
