Sony Delays Release Of PlayStation 3 Until November By SEBASTIAN MOFFETT Wall Street Journal
March 15, 2006 10:29 a.m. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114240727278998742.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news TOKYO Sony Corp. announced a delay in the launch of its next-generation videogame console until November from this spring, extending the head start of Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 and placing huge pressure on the Japanese company's end-of-year sales. The new console, the PlayStation 3, will feature a souped-up version of the DVD, and will download music and movies, and enable videoconferencing. Sony plans to produce one million of the consoles a month from the release in early November and a total of six million by March 2007. Success for the PlayStation 3 is vital for Sony's chances of making a full turnaround, after the company lost money for two straight quarters in 2005, amid tumbling prices for television sets. Though Sony has rebounded in recent months, due to improvements in its core electronics business, any loss of market share in game consoles would threaten its long-term health. The PlayStation consoles have been Sony's most consistent earner in recent years, as the company leads the expanding, fast-evolving game-console market. The PlayStation is also a key part of the Sony brand strength. PlayStation 3 should fizz with futuristic technologies that Sony has risked vast amounts of time and money developing. The star of these will be the high-capacity Blu-ray optical disc, which will store games and display high-definition movies. The console will run on a chip called "Cell" developed with International Business Machines Corp. and Toshiba Corp. These gadgets, Sony says, will enable PlayStation 3 to bring movie-quality graphics to videogames, as well as let developers create detailed and lifelike videogame worlds. On Wednesday, Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, said images on the PlayStation 3 would be significantly more realistic than those on its predecessor: Whereas the PS2 provided an enhanced sense of space, PS3 would add to that images that move fast enough to give a feeling of "live" action. But this ambitious technology was also the reason for the delay. Sony had announced last year that the PlayStation 3 would likely go on sale this spring. But the company is still trying to finalize the copyright-protection technology for Blu-ray, said Mr. Kutaragi. This was supposed to have been finished by September 2005, but will not in fact be done until April. "There were improvements [to the technology] that were decided on since then," he told a news conference in Tokyo. The delay means Sony is losing time to its rivals in the game console business. Microsoft has already released its new machine, the Xbox 360, in November 2005. This year, Nintendo is lining up a new console, the Nintendo Revolution, which will feature a radical new type of controller: When the player holds this, and moves his hand, the console senses this movement and position in space, freeing the player from a hand-held keypad. Sony's share price fell 1.8% on Wednesday after a Japanese newspaper report predicting much of the announcement. Still, Sony may be able to use the delay to its advantage, if it generates enough buzz before the Christmas gift season. Mr. Kutaragi said he was planning a simultaneous world-wide launch also in time for Thanksgiving in the U.S. Analysts say that if the console comes out in November as scheduled, the delay will likely not damage Sony's earnings too much. "We see no major negative earnings impact if the console reaches the market in time for the Christmas retail season," wrote Yasuo Nakane, an analyst in Tokyo with the Deutsche Bank Group in a report Wednesday. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
