More Bad News for the PS3

Reports now say that Sony will be shipping 2 million PS3 units to the United States and Japan by the end of 2006--down from the company's promised 4 million units. That means 400,000 PS3's in the U.S. at launch.

How bad is it? Sony has decided not to launch in Europe until 2007--after the Christmas season.

It's shocking!

The game industry is not amused--particularly not by the most recent demonstration of Sony's willingness to publicly maintain positions which are clearly untenable until the the last possible moment:

We simply felt that for the giant corporation to slip the European launch - after standing on stage and telling the whole world that it was committed to November 17th - would be so embarrassing for the firm as to be inconceivable. The very fact that the firm's own track record contains a similar embarrassment in the form of the PSP launch - which eventually slipped a massive nine months in Europe - seemed to stand as a stark reminder that Sony had learned a hard lesson and would pull out all the stops to prevent a recurrence.