Yesterday we wrote that the Playstation 3 will only be available on European shelves in March next year, but now Sony has also indicated that those racks will not have to be very large. While the company yesterday did not lower its forecast sales for fiscal 2007, it has now been announced that it will not have the planned two million units available at launch. By November of this year, when the console is released in America and Japan, only 400,000 and 100,000 consoles will be available for these markets, respectively. Due to difficulties in producing the necessary Blu-ray drives, Sony will not be able to produce more than half a million Playstations on time. In the calendar year 2006, Sony expects to sell only two million consoles, instead of the previously announced four million. It is striking that Ken Kuratagi, director of Sony Computer Entertainment, states that the production capacity has “only” been reduced by one million units, instead of one and a half million, due to the supply problems of the Blu-ray drives.
At the time of the Xbox 360 launch, there were several robberies to obtain a console and there was reportedly even one fatality. In addition, up to a thousand dollars for an Xbox 360 were offered on eBay. Back then, there were about four million Microsoft consoles available.