After its initial launch of 400K units into the U.S. market, SCEA plans to ship another 800K units via air-freight through the end of the year, making 1.2 million units total.
Speaking to analysts late last week, the firm added some flesh to the bones of its recent announcements. The split between premium (60GB) and core (20GB) units at U.S. retail stores should be roughly 80/20. Sony believes it can ramp monthly PS3 production to 1.2 million units by January due to anticipated improvements in Blu-Ray laser supplies.
The firm says a further 1.2 million units will be available in Japan following the initial launch-day arrival of 100K units. Analysts believe Sony will have managed a run-rate of 14 million units for 2007.
Details of the PS3 online network were discussed in broad terms, with, as expected, plans for basic community features such as video, audio and text chat, gamer rankings, as well as limited content downloads such as casual games and game updates as well s non-games downloads such as full music and video, user-generated content, and Internet browsing. SCEA indicated that full downloads of console games will not be practical in the near term due to storage and bandwidth constraints.
LINKY So Sony plan to ship a further 800,000 units before the end of the year, though they don' t specify whether they mean by the end of the calander year (31st December) or by the end of the fiscal year (31st March). Either way, by that time they should have shipped/sold 1.2 million PS3' s in the US, arguably the most important of the 3 major territories.
They also want to produce 1.2 million units per month by January, but i find that unlikely. 1.2 million units is possible as they have multiple production lines, but that would mean 1.2 million lasers per month by January and they haven' t even managed half of that for launch.
The 80/20 unit split is also worrying. That means 80% of all available units will cost $599 with only 20% costing $499. Since not everybody wants the wireless, HDMI and larger HDD etc i think the split is purposefully designed to FORCE those that want launch units and early adopters to pay for the premium console.
Their projections of moving 14 million units by the end of 2007 is certainly possible, but again it' s going to depend largely on Sony getting all the lasers they require as well as avoiding complications or shortages of other key components, ...like CELL. Either way, it means that Microsoft will maintain their lead and it will be 2008 at the earliest when Sony overtake as far as marketshare goes.
As for their network plans, video, audio and text chat (chat using a keyboard?!), gamer rankings, game downloads (PS/2), music and video downloads and game updates are obviously all carbon copies of XBL services. I wouldn' t however expect everything to be up and running on day one as they' ll want to gauge the feasability of putting them into place as the cost for a network platform like XBL or Sony' s percieved equivlent is astronomical. Sony, won' t want to break the bank and so will have to gradually add services as the install base grows.
If Sony make developers use their own servers then many publishers may shy away from putting fully fledged online components into place and people who' ve already tried playing 360 games on EA' s servers will already know that they fall way short of an unified service such as that provided by Microsoft.
That said, it' s nice to have some projections to work with. Microsoft have moved what they predicted after initially coming up short at the start of the year due to production issues and are projected to surpass their yearly goals, something that' s now been strengthened by Sony delaying the launch of PS3 in Europe.
TGS is less than 2 weeks away now and the pre-show media briefings are even closer. It' ll be interesting to see the final stages of Sony' s launch strategy after they failed to make much of an impact at E3 and at GC. TGS, for Sony, and for Sony' s " fans" will be the most important event in 12 months. Sony will come out of September strong and then the ad campaigns should really kick in as we countdown to launch.