[Harry]

Originally Posted by jjmoohead

Hey Guys, Not only is Europe getting the finger, so is the rest of the world. Sure you might not offically get a release until March 2007, but hey guess what. Canada will get about 40,000 units spread all over this vast land. So the chances of getting one before March 2007 are slim and nill.

But on a side note, 80% of the people in here were not getting one until more games came out and with March 2007 a month expected for good releases then it shouldnt really matter.

JJ is right. The problem is really on a bigger scale. All PAL countries - Europe, Russia, Middle East, Africa, and Australasia - won't get the console until March 2007. This is a huge portion of the market.

The causes of this delay are many, and most of them won't ever make it on an official press release from Sony.

Sony has always treated customers in Old World countries poorly. There are many reasons behind this delay,

1. SCEE is easily the less responsive, less inspired branch of SCEI - according to my personal experience, even their PR offices are the slowest in answering requests from the press, lost in the all-European bureaucracy that is non-existent in the North American SCEA. If you consider Final Fantasy XI for the PlayStation 2 was never released in Europe, and that the Network Adapter for European consoles doesn't include a built-in modem, you already have a good idea of how SCEE pales in comparison with SCEA.

2. They must have the feeling that the market in the Old World is already in their hands. In Europe, the Xbox is and will always be considered a second-choice system, that will hardly ever reach the popularity of the PlayStation, even though the Xbox360 launch went fairly well in United Kingdom. Anyhow, European kids in the stores talk about PlayStations, not about Xbox, or Xbox 1.5.

3. There is a shortage of components, mostly caused by the high production costs; production costs of high-tech components go down exponentially, month after month. By delaying the launch in PAL countries, Sony is borrowing time, waiting for production costs to go down. I think it's obvious that if the Xbox 360 wasn't around, the PlayStation 3 would have been released worldwide no sooner than late 2007 - but Sony needs to release the system as soon as possible, or Microsoft (and Nintendo, in Japan) could become more dangerous than they ever expected to. So, they decided to delay the launch in the less troublesome market, focusing all their resources on the market where they really have to fight with all they have, North America.

In other words, PAL countries will get their console in March 2007 not because consoles in these countries are any different from those in North America, but because Sony’s marketing experts decided this was the only way to cut production costs without having to delay the launch worldwide. Market in Old World countries is immensely “slower” than in North America – at this point, a delay in the launch in North America could kill the PlayStation brand.

Anyhow, at first I though all the delays were part of Sony’s marketing plans. They hoped, and probably they still do, to make the Xbox 360 look even more like a rushed out Xbox 1.5 by releasing a more powerful system. But now it’s obvious SCEI is having a lot of problems with the PlayStation 3. Even the Dual Shock-less controller gaffe (why didn’t they admit they couldn’t use the technology because of the copyright infringement lawsuit they lost against a company now half owned by Microsoft, instead of shoveling stupid excuses to the public?) is a symptom of SCEI’s problems. Which company in good health would have accepted to trash a project like the Dual Shock, on which it has spent millions and millions of dollars in development and marketing?