PS3 sales have dipped slightly. Sony as a whole is hurting. But don't go counting Sony out. Sony's a fighter. And more importantly, Sony's Sony.

"We simply have to suffer a little," Sony Europe honcho David Reeves tells The Guardian, "go down in market share and mind-share. It's like Ali vs. Foreman — go eight or nine rounds and let him punch himself out. We're still standing, we're still profitable and there's a lot of fight in us. I don't say we will land a knockout blow, but we're there and we're fighting."

Sony's not only fighting, but learning from its competitors. "We've learned from Nintendo how to grow the market and move from handheld device to device — they've done it brilliantly," Reeves says. "And we've learned an enormous amount from Microsoft, too."

As the economic climate worsens, Reeves concedes that customers will be shopping on price. Sony is thus continuing to make the PS3 competitive as a game console and as a multi-media device.

Reeves also tells The Guardian why Sony didn't offer a pre-holiday PS3 price cut: "If we'd cut the price, lost another billion dollars, we might have had a huge Christmas but it would have been followed by a huge loss. The company could have thought: 'Hmm, I'm not sure I want to be in this business at all.' But we've shown Sony this is still a good business to have."

The bright spot: According to The Guardian, Sony has racked up 1.1 million in Killzone 2 pre-orders.

'We simply have to suffer,' says Sony Europe's gaming chief [The Guardian via VG247] [Pic]