Thursday, September 07, 2006

No PS3 Till March For Australia

[News] [Computer Gaming]

The word is out - the release of the PlayStation 3 in Australia and pretty much everywhere else that isn't America or Japan has been pushed back till March 2007. The delay is believed to have been caused by component shortages associated with production of the Blu-Ray drive.

Not that America and Japan have it easy, either. On launch day there'll be only 400,000 units available for sale in the US and barely 100,000 in Japan.

Heads will no doubt be rolling at Sony over this, especially if Nintendo somehow manages a worldwide release of the Wii before Christmas, effectively stealing a four month lead in the PAL territories.

Deliberate stock shortages at launch have long been a tactic used by console makers to create artificial demand and produce media footage of consumers lined up outside game stores. But when the shortage is so bad that you can't sell the console in some territories at all, you've moved beyond media stunt and into the realms of corpororate catastrophe.

As for me, I wasn't planning to buy a PS3 until the price game down and the killer apps came out anyway, so I guess there's no loss there.

More details here and here, via Gamasutra.

1 comment:

Phrancq said...

Rocks fall! Wii wins! I'd be annoyed and all about yet another product getting delayed for the PAL regions, but Sony have gone out of their way to make the PS3 unnapealing.