The PS3 is one day old now in the UK and across Europe and has been a succesful launch for Sony.
Many European countries have sold out of their allocations, and in the UK, the biggest European games console market, a massive dent in the 200,000 consoles available has been made.
Some people may say it hasn’t been a success because the machine hasn’t sold out, but Sony have got their launch allocation spot on. If they wanted to sell out they could easily have with-held some of their allocation or redistributed to other European countries. As it is customers can visit stores and get hold of their PS3’s. For now.
The PlayStation 3 is not only the world’s most powerful games machine, but also the world’s most expensive. To make such an impact as it has is impressive for two major reasons.
1. The machine is costly. It is priced at a level that is around the average for a monthly mortgage or a couple of months car payments.
2. It has been released away from the Christmas ‘must-buy’ period. Both the Xbox 360 and the Wii (for which there was significantly less initial stock available) were launched just before Christmas.
The features and capabilities of the machine are so great that Sony are making a significant loss on the actual machine. It has the technology that could typically be priced at around double its price tag.
UK stock will sell out shortly, just as it did with the PSP. It is an amazing machine full of possibilites, extremely user friendly and can be attached to pretty much every gadget you can think. I have found no problems yet with backwards compatibility with my PS2 game collection, and I have hooked up my iPod (the PS3 easily stored all the songs and album covers, and videos). I have attached my PSP, have transferred files from USB sticks, have copied pictures from my camera’s SD cards, transferred items from my mobile phone, played some of the most amazing games I have seen, downloaded Gran Turismo for free (cheers Sony), downloaded all the demo’s, all the Blu-Ray trailers, hooked the PS3 wirelessly to the internet and had a couple of games of Motorstorm online (I am rubbish so far) and played Call of Duty 3 online (twice I captured the flag!).
All very very simple, yet such a powerful machine.
It’s a signficant step forward for home entertainment and will power the High Definition move in the UK. After a few hours of watching Blu-Ray clips I am already struggling to get back to watching, what I like to call, Low Definition.
Sony has finally found it’s footing, after it’s European launch. The only question now will be – how long before it outnumbers the Xbox 360. I’ll give it 9 months.
