2 million shipped at 16 January. Taking Sony's own number of being able to produce 1.2 million PS3's per month, that would put them at roughly 5 million shipped at the end of March. Assuming they won't make the 1.2 million exactly, their figure of 4.5 million shipped at the end of March seems reasonable. I don't think Sony has to worry too much about having some PS3s lying on the shelves in the U.S. and Japan for a bit. If I know the European market, as well as the effect of the upcoming games that are released over the February-March period, then come March and the European launch, and we'll have global shortages again until well into the summer.
It will be interesting to see whether Sony will stick with the 1.0-1.2 million production capacity for now (assuming they fully meet that, which it seems likely they will, as they seem to be at about 500.000 per two weeks now), and aim for 12 million PS3s out on the shelves by Christmas 2007, or whether they will be more aggressive and ramp up production. I think they should at the very least prepare for being able to do so by Summer, because whether or not they sell, they should be prepared to keep up with the 360. Forget the Wii for the moment - the Wii will do well the next two years, no doubt, and the Wii's competitors will actually mostly be the handhelds and the PS2.
But in Europe, some significant things are happening that they should be ready for. For instance, in early summer nearly all Dutch channels will have switched to widescreen broadcasting. This is all part of a European trend, and very likely to stimulate sales of TV sets in an unexpected way - Sony should be ready to bring combined PS3 and Bravia deals to the table. Also important I think is that Sony quickly starts to bring out smaller games that show that the PS3 can in fact compete with the Wii in more areas than people think it can right now. Not so much in the sense that people will think that the PS3 is an expensive version of the Wii, but in the sense that people will have an increased perception of hey, out of the many things it does already, it can do that too. This will help the richer early adopter. To give an illustration, they should probably do a good looking bowling game with some nice physics, that is still fun, uses the Sixaxis, and make it a downloadable game costing 20 euros or so. Or maybe if Namco is clever, this is what they are doing with Tekken 5: DR the U.S. version, adding in the Tekken Bowl mode with Sixaxis support. Two other downloadable games they should get out there are Loco Roco and Mercury - the former should be piss-easy to do, and the latter even easier, since they are already well underway with the Wii version. This follows in the trend of getting PSP games onto the PS3 as they have been doing with Gripshift, and should be easy to do, yet have a very significant impact.
At this point, I wish I was working with Sony - there is so much potential in the system, and I would love being in a position where I could make things happen (yeah I know, so would Phil Harrison probably
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