ony Computer Entertainment Europe president David Reeves says releasing quality hardware is key to growing the games market.

"... Another thing we have committed to for supporting market growth is putting out quality hardware - you don't grow the market by putting out shoddy machines," he said. "So we try to make sure that PS3s have a failure rate of just two to three percent, which is very low by industry standards."

The Sony exec's comments come from an interview with MCV, in which he doesn't directly refer to Xbox 360's dreaded Red Ring of Death failure, although it's hard not to draw the link from what he says. Our Wii's still working anyway...

It's a fair thing for Reeves to point out too. Only yesterday we were talking about how reliable PS3 seems considering the fact that we've all experienced the RRoD with our 360s, some of us on four different consoles.

However, it wasn't all cheeky sniping, with Reeves actually going on to praise the other platform holders, showing a bit of Christmas spirit between the big guys.

"On the competition, I will say Nintendo have only done good things. They have expanded geographically and dramatically extended demographically. They have never been afraid to try new products, be that hardware, or software or peripherals.

"For Microsoft, again, I can understand that, again, they have put money into the market and have initiated growth. In some ways what they have done is brought forward consumers from next year into this year.

"By bringing the price down they are trying to establish themselves quickly, as they did with the first Xbox. But they have built online in a meaningful way and the competition they have brought to the market place is great."

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=204476