taken from Fragland http://www.fragland.net/news.php?id=12572


The head of the French publishing company Ubisoft, has stated that Europe shouldn' t expect the PlayStation 3 console before November. This would mean, exactly a year after the Xbox360 was released.

Yves Guillemot furthermore said that the PS3 will be available this summer (probably June or July) for Japanese residents. The US release would follow in September, leaving Europe (once again) as last.

" We think September could be the right time for Sony in the US and November in Europe," he said, " Japan a bit earlier, say June or July."


This is more realistic than " spring 2006" and if it is true, then we are in for a tight regional realse. And europe isnt left behind.


And if you havent heard the news yet about The Blue ray encoding..

Region 1: North America, South America, East Asia except for China (India, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia etc.)
Region 2: Europe and Africa
Region 3: China, Russia and other countries

which means north america should have very good game tradeings with Japan.


But everything isnt final, so dont take all of this seriously yet.

The Blu-Ray region encoding is only for movies, not games. I expect not to be able to play Japanese games on my US system without some kind of " help" in doing so.

you sure? i didnt hear anything about that. maybe your right. anyway it dosent matter, it still HAS region encodeing, which sucks. Priacy isnt as big as companys make it off to be.

that would be cool, lol. but what if they still wanna do the security thing with the game discs, where the ps3 inscribes a code on the disc when it' s inserted for the first time, and it can only be played on that console? Are they still gonna do that? if they do, say goodbye to buying used games. and what about renting games? bah

That' s probaby the most realistic release info i' ve heard. I don' t think it' s good for Sony though, they' re gonna be playing catch-up. It does mean though that we can expect some very polished games, hopefully better than 360' s mediocre offering (Call Of Duty 2 rocks! Perfect Dark Sucks Ass!).

But, the region encoding seems highly suspicious. Why would they change the regions around for Blu-Ray?! Japan has ALWAYS been region 2. I don' t see why they would change it all of a sudden.

And while it is definately for dvd' s, Sony may also decide to use the region lockout for games too, although they haven' t for PSP. Personally i prefer MS' s stance, letting publishers decide whether to region-lock a game.

I think the ' write to' security thing has been dropped, at least it better had be for Sony' s own sake. It was a stupid idea in the first place and got as bad a reception from the public as their controller (which is still subject to change). If they do use it, and kill pre-owned games off, i won' t be buying the machine. It' s that simple. Sony may have a serious fight on their hands, with 360 having a year headstart (which will count, but isn' t as important at MS make out), and Nintendo coming back strong (especially if the rumours about it' s visuals, which are supposed to be on par with 360' s ' Oblivion' are too be believed). If they launch ' expensive' as they said they would then they' re screwed!

(The reference to Revolutions visuals are based on details from gametrailers.com, where a forum poster has claimed, and has quite a following because of tons of previous information he has ' leaked' well before announcements in the past. Personally i' m highly suspicious, due to developers already ' leaking' details about Revs amount of memory. Unless ofcourse all the ' displacement mapping' stuff is true, in which case it could be done, bearing in mind that all of 360' s launch games are running on only 1 of it' s 3 cores).

Ha, Joe, you' re proposed names for Rev were highly amusing. You should change the R-Type to Type-R (for Revolution) though. R-Type ruled!