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That’s right; Japan, North America, Europe and Australia will receive the new console simultaneously in November 2006. Sony plan to produce one million units per month and plan to ship six million units by the end of March 2007.
David Reeves, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe was delighted about the pre-Christmas worldwide release of the PlayStation 3: “We are absolutely delighted that we will be able to bring PS3 to gamers in Europe and Australia before Christmas,” commented Reeves. “This is an exciting first for Europe, and is a huge endorsement and vote of confidence in the strength of the European market and its importance globally.”
Reports gathered from journalists at the business briefing also state that Ken Kutaragi, President, Sony Computer Entertainment, announced that the PlayStation 3 will require a hard drive, but didn’t specify if it would ship with the console or not. The 60 GB drive is said to be upgradeable and will support the Linux OS. The exact price of the console is yet to be announced, but it’s said to be no less than 50.000YEN (~$425USD).
Also announced was full backwards compatibility with PlayStation and PlayStation 2 titles, including texture filtering and support for high resolutions. This is akin to what the Xbox 360 does for Xbox games, but Sony claim that the PlayStation 3 will support all titles. Microsoft has come under strong criticism for the way it has handled backwards compatibility, and Sony is sure to capitalise on this.
Games weren’t mentioned, but an online service was. Details were thin on the ground, but there’ll be support for lobbies, voice chat, bootable software via the hard drive and more. A ‘basic’ service will be provided for free, suggesting a system similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Silver and Xbox Live Gold. What functionality will be available in the ‘basic’ service is yet to be announced.
Sony also cleared up the Blu-ray situation, stating that all PlayStation 3 titles will ship on the new media format. The console will still play PlayStation and PlayStation 2 discs, as well as standard DVD movies. Final PlayStation 3 dev kits are scheduled to ship to developers in June, giving them five months to finalise their launch titles.
It seems that we’ll have to wait until E3 in May before we see any major game announcements, but a worldwide launch in November is great news for gamers everywhere. We’ll bring you more news if we hear anything more.
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