Playstation 3: Releases in North America on Friday, November 17th. 400,000 units.
Nintendo Wii: Releases in North America on Sunday, November 19th. 1.1 million units.
Citing production problems with blue lasers, Sony has scaled back the number of consoles available in Japan during launch. Damn those blue lasers.
That's the least of Sony's problems, as Japanese gamers are reporting that the Playstation 3 has problems playing older PS One and PS2 games.
Since the PS3 is now available in Japan, disassembly of the system has been done.
Retailers meanwhile, are out to gouge the consumer. BestBuy has canceled all online pre-orders, citing a systems glitch and at least in Southern California, Fry's Electronics will only sell PS3s and Wiis as bundles (though specifics of what the bundles will be is unknown at this time), but the rumor is 8 games for the PS3, and 5 games for the Wii.
Ouch. The more I survey the console battlefield, the more certain I am of the PS3's high price of the system on the secondary market seems to be driven by greed, as can be seen in these Japanese photographs of "used" PS3s in Akihabara, a day after the launch.. 128,000 yen ($1100 USD) for a 60 GB PS3!
Of course, what I find positively brilliant about the Japanese launch of the PS3 is that Sony made Kutaragi go to a Bic Camera and do a little pre-launch speech -- only to find out that the first twenty or so campers in the line were Chinese. Japanese businessmen had outsourced to Chinese immigrants to stand in line for them.
I wonder what the camp status of Mexico and Canada are...
My advice to the gamer: Stay home this launch season. Maintain your sanity (and your checkbook) and wait until February (or better yet -- summer) when stock is abundant, and prices aren't outrageous. There's plenty of other great games out there. Ken Kutaragi says the PS3's lifecycle is ten years(!), so what's the rush?
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