Sony: "It's not going to take too long to pass 360"

Sony's senior VP of marketing and head of the PlayStation Network has said that Sony is now "breathing down the necks" of Microsoft in terms of console sales, and predicted that while the PS3 will fulfil its planned 10 year lifespan, the 360 won't be around for as long.

"We can be passionate fans, but I don't think they'll be around in 10 years so I'm very confident we'll pass them within that time frame," Peter Dille said in an interview with IGN.

"I mean, we've got 31 million [units sold] worldwide right now - they've got 39 million [units sold]. I don't even need to go out 10 years. I'm not going to make any predictions for your interview today other than we'll pass them, but you look at where we are today and where they are today, and they had an opportunity to sprint as far ahead of us as possible when they had the head start.

"Well, we're breathing down their necks and they can see us in the rearview mirror and it's not going to take too long to pass them."

Speaking specifically about the PlayStation Network, Dille also backed up recent comments by Kaz Hirai that Sony was looking into charging for new additions to the service.

"It's been our philosophy not to charge for it from launch up until now, but Kaz recently went on the record as saying that's something we're looking at. I can confirm that as well. That's something that we're actively thinking about," he said.

Dille added that the company is pleased with how the PlayStation Home space is performing, saying that December saw the highest traffic yet for the service.

"The average time people spend in Home is about 60 minutes. If you think about that, it's a lot of time. I know you can sit down and game for hours and time gets lost. But think about watching a TV for a half hour or how much time you might spend on a website - there's are kind of bite-sized chunks of time. But to spend 60 minutes on Home is a pretty sticky experience."

People are also spending money in Home. Virtual items become profitable from the day they launch "because it doesn't cost a lot to create a virtual t-shirt," said Dille. And those items also become drivers for gaming content, he added.

"People walk around in Home and if they see someone wearing an artifact from Uncharted or God of War, they might ask, 'Where'd you get that?' and they might go back to that specific game space, learn more about it, become a fan of that game and then go buy the Blu-ray disc."