Sony told European buyers in September that the PlayStation 3 would not arrive until March, and I still do not think people have fully processed how bad that is.
The stated reason is blue laser diodes. Blu-ray needs them, Sony cannot make enough of them, and the arithmetic of a simultaneous three-territory launch stopped working. So Japan and North America get their consoles in November with reduced allocations, and Europe gets to watch. Four months is not a slip. Four months is an entire Christmas.
Consider what actually happens in that window. The Xbox 360 will have been on European shelves for well over a year by March, with a software library that has stopped being an apology and started being a reason. The Wii arrives here in early December at a price that makes it an impulse purchase for a family. Both of those consoles will spend the entire holiday quarter in living rooms while the PlayStation brand sits in a warehouse. Sony has spent a decade telling Europe that PlayStation is the default, and it is about to hand a full season to two competitors without a fight.
The price does not help. The hardware is genuinely impressive on paper, and I do not doubt that Cell is a formidable processor if somebody works out how to program it. But a console is not sold on a block diagram. Sony is asking for a number that puts it in a different category from its competitors, and it is asking European buyers to hold that thought for four extra months while cheaper machines with actual games sit next to the empty shelf space.
There is a defence for the delay, and it is not a stupid one. Launching without stock is its own kind of failure, and a paper launch where nobody can buy the thing generates resentment rather than momentum. Sony has watched Microsoft do exactly that a year ago and take a beating for it. Better to be late and available than on time and absent. I understand the logic. I just think the logic assumes European buyers will wait, and I am not convinced they will.
The Blu-ray argument is the one I find least persuasive. Sony has bolted a format war onto a games console and is asking players to subsidise it. If you want the PS3 because you want a Blu-ray player, it is arguably good value, and there are not many other ways to get one this cheaply. If you want it because you want to play games, you are paying a substantial premium for an optical drive standard that has not won anything yet and might not. HD DVD is cheaper, it is shipping, and the studios have not settled. Tying your console’s cost structure to an unresolved format fight is a bet, and Sony has made it with the customer’s money.
What Europe actually gets out of the delay, if anything, is a machine with more finished software on it. The North American launch lineup looks thin from here, and thin launch lineups age badly. By March there should be more worth playing, and the firmware will have been through a few revisions on somebody else’s console. That is a real consolation and it is not nothing.
It is also not enough. The thing Sony is spending here is not revenue, it is default status. For two console generations the question in a European household was which PlayStation to buy. This Christmas, for the first time, that question has to be asked from scratch, and Nintendo has priced its answer at a level that makes trying it cheap. Habits formed in December do not always survive until March.
I would love to be wrong about this. A three-way fight is better for everybody who plays games than another Sony walkover. But the version where Sony arrives in spring, at a premium price, into a market that has already spent its money, is the version I would bet on right now.