Kev's Development Toolbox

Industry analysts at Merrill Lynch are suggesting that the launch of the PS3 may be delayed between 6 and 12 months, despite news from Sony last week that they are ‘pledging’ a 2006 launch. The report from the analyst also estimates that the initial materials cost for Sony per unit will be as high as $900, which again raises doubts on the initial launch price, which is either going to be considerably higher than first expected, or that Sony will be making roughly $300 loss per unit sold if they sell at the expected $599.

A delay of between 6 – 12 months may mean a late 2006 launch for Japan, followed by early 2007 for US.

Although the News.com article linked to above does not state a reason for the delay, an article on TheRegister with the same news says that Sony are waiting for the copy protection scheme for Blu-Ray disks to be finalized, and if it is not in time for an early 2006 launch then they will be forced to delay before they can ship with PS3, which will include a BluRay drive.

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…