Chris Deering talks PSP and PSX - again

SCEE boss Chris Deering has spoken again about the company's plans for the PlayStation Portable, and for the forthcoming PSX, in an interview published in French newspaper Les Echos this week.

Although less enlightening than Deering's fascinating keynote at the ELSPA Games Summit in London last month, this interview did include a few interesting morsels of information - most notably a comment on the price point which the PSP will launch at.

According to Deering, "it will certainly be less than portable DVD players and likely more comparable to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance" - suggesting a price point in the â'¬150 range, rather than the â'¬300-â'¬400 range which some commentators had feared. Deering also confirmed that the unit will ship to European retailers late next year.

On the topic of the PSX, Deering was less informative - commenting only that "we expect it to appeal only to technophiles". This is an interesting statement, since it almost directly contradicts the party line of Sony in Japan on the device - which is being heavily pushed there as a lifestyle device, and almost as a "stealth console" for living rooms where a PlayStation 2 might be an unwelcome addition.

Finally, then, the darkest horse of them all - PlayStation 3. "All I can really say is that it definitely won't launch in 2004," Deering helpfully told Les Echos. Nope, the earth didn't move for us either.