The bad news just doesn’t stop for Sony. Exploding laptop batteries. Telling gamers that they’ll pay any price, regardless of how expensive, for the PS3. Kaz Hirai shouting “Riiiiidge Racer!” at E3. And now this.
1up News is reporting that according to the European Herald Tribune, the PS3 will be delayed in Europe until an unspecified date in March of 2007. Sony will instead be focusing it’s efforts on launches in the United States and Japan. Ken Kutaragi (President of Sony Computer Entertainment) indicated that he was “sorry not to be able to answer all the expectations”.
Clearly this is horrible news for Sony and for European gamers. My heart goes out to millions of folks in the U.K. and Germany and Russia who had ‘November 17′ circled on their calendar and were hoping to have a console this holiday season — particularly since the European market has been particularly loyal to Sony, accounting for a large portion of their market share.
I took a trip over to Microsoft Community Manager Major Nelson’s blog (great source of Xbox 360 news, but this guy almost always seems to catch the bad Sony news and has all of his fanboys lavish in it with their posts). Naturally he had the story posted. About a hundred gamers had already posted their poorly thought out comments about how this meant the death of Sony and “long live the 360.” But certain facts can be deduced from the announcement. Most of them bad for Sony. But some, not quite so bad.
Let’s explore them. Read the rest of this entry »
