Doubts Raised Over European PS3 Launch

Phil Harrison cannot commit to the console being here when Sony said it would arrive.

The PSP was released in Europe nearly nine months after it launched in Japan and still there were supply issues. The PlayStation 3 is launching in Japan this weekend. Is Sony going to have enough consoles to go around when it brings its new box to Europe this winter? Even one of Sony's top executives won't say.

"Given that all of our previous statements about launching in Europe simultaneously with the US and Japan turned out not to be the case, I would not like to make any definitive statements on that," Sony's Phil Harrison told the official UK PlayStation magazine, as reported by quasi-official blog ThreeSpeech.

But Harrison had some words of reassurance: "It's not my job to comment on hardware supply issues other than to say some very smart people are working very hard to catch up. In fact, the ramp up is already starting to happen in supply and output, just obviously too late for us to have launched in Europe at the same times as the US."

There's been a loss of confidence in Sony's abilities to hit its own targets. The PlayStation 3 was originally planned to go on sale worldwide in November and December, with 2 million consoles ready for launch and another 2 million done by the end of the year.

Sony says it's still on track for the latter, but one official recently admitted that even that is only a target.

The console debuts in Japan on Saturday, 11 November, though there will only be 80,000 units for the entire country. Sony is also readying another 400,000 consoles for the American launch on 17 November.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo