He may not be the most impartial of judges, but Microsoft’s regional head of entertainment doesn’t mince his words when it comes to the PlayStation 3.

“In the technology and gaming there’s really little in the PS3 where I can say, ‘Gosh, I wish we had that’,” Neil Thompson, the company’s senior regional director for UK and Ireland, said. “The biggest threat that Sony has for us is the brand that’s been established around it.”

He conceded that the PlayStation’s graphics would give the Xbox a run for its money, but said that the Xbox outstripped its rival in the increasingly popular online gaming world, as well as in the number of games available.

“You have to have a range and quality of gaming content,” Mr Thompson said. “More and more we’re seeing that the online experience is a really important factor. Sony have come up with an online world that seems to let you do just about everything except gaming.”

Mr Thompson said that Microsoft had no plans to cut the price of the Xbox, arguing that the £279 price tag is already good value.

Sony has argued that the PS3’s £425 price tag is good value considering its cutting-edge technology, but Mr Thompson questioned whether the Blu-ray drive, the PS3’s high-definition DVD player whose complexity contributed to delays of several months, would prove much of an attraction.

“It’s two, three years ahead of the market,” he said. “People won’t want to replace their entire DVD collections, and they’ll get a better resolution with a standard DVD on an Xbox than a PS3.”

Mr Thompson suggested that the high-definition format war, in which Microsoft has backed the HD-DVD format that rivals Blu-ray, may be rendered obsolete by advancing technology.

“It’s nowhere near the importance of the format war between VHS and DVD,” he said. “The internet is becoming an increasingly important medium. Surely online is going to be the distribution method for much of the high-definition content.”