Despite rumors on various websites from developers supposedly working on launch titles for the PS3 and doubting the possibility of a 2006 release due to hardware issues, Sony have pledged that the PS3 will launch in 2006 (also see here). They have not confirmed a release date though, and they don’t seem to be promising Spring 2006 anymore, and their annoucement in December last year saying that they were still on track for a Spring release now seems doubtful.
If it is ready to ship this year then we can expect to see working hardware at the May E3 conference, followed by a Japan and US launch later this year. A working console was not shown at the recent Taipei Game Show, which again indicates that the console is not yet ready, and definitely will not ship in Spring as promised last year.
Sony are due to present a keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference next month, titled ‘Playstation 3: Beyond the box’, so it may be possible that they have a real demo of a working machine next month, although some think this is still unlikely. Some game developers have reported that the hardware development kit they received to develop their launch titles was actually much larger that the design concept boxes on show at E3 last year, which has left people wondering how they are going to compress the hardware to fit inside the box…