The latest of today’s (seemingly very well-founded) rumours is that the official announcement on the launch date of the PS3 in Europe will be made next Tuesday (January 23). And as mentioned before, it’s looking highly likely that the launch date itself will be March 23.

Proverbial sources close to PlayStation have stated that the European launch date for the PS3 is to be confirmed in the next week to ten days. Moreover, it’s looking highly likely the date in question will be March 23. More info to follow soon…

Shipments in Japan of the new PlayStation 3 video game machines reached a million Tuesday, Sony said, hitting the company’s target about two weeks behind schedule.

Sony Computer Entertainment said in a release that a global shipment of two million reached within about two months after a machine’s launch is the fastest pace for any game console ever put out by the company. (Associated Press)

Here’s the latest film promoting the PlayStation 3 to UK audiences. Called ‘Processing’, this one uses the speed stacking phenomenon to highlight the console’s processing power.

For those looking forward to getting your hands on GTHD, here’s a press release we found on its creator, Kazunori Yamauchi - President of Polyphony Digital and Creator of Gran Turismo® Franchise / Corporate Executive, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.,

Hometown – Kashiwa, Japan
Personal Cars – 2005 Ford GT, Honda S2000, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution V, Porsche GT3, Nissan 350Z, Mercedes AMG SL55.

Since he was three years old, Kazunori Yamauchi has had a fascination with cars. It was not until he was 15 years old, when he began building the original concept for Gran Turismo. When reflecting back, Yamauchi states, “I feel very lucky to be able to create a driving game that can capture the emotion and true-feel of automobiles from around the world in unique and well-known locales.”

Since the inception of the Gran Turismo franchise, Yamauchi and Polyphony Digital have revolutionized the racing category as we know it today. His offerings provide the gamer with the most true-to-life driving simulation within the industry and a unique medium for automobile manufacturers to showcase their products. In Motor Trend Magazine’s February 2005, 2006 and 2007 issue, Yamauchi was selected among the top 50 most powerful people in the automotive industry. In the January 2006 issue of the UK’s popular Car Magazine, Yamauchi was selected as the most powerful man in the industry. Details Magazine included him in its “Top 40 under 40” feature. When commenting on Gran Turismo, Newsweek stated in its March 10, 2003 issue, “Games like GT3 are turning millions of couch potatoes into living-room racers…becoming the new virtual showroom and design studio for automakers.”

SCEA – Yamauchi Biography

Through the Gran Turismo franchise, one can clearly see that Yamauchi is a great fan of cars and motorsports. Currently, Yamauchi owns a 2005 Ford GT, Honda S2000, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution V, Porsche GT3, Nissan 350Z and a Mercedes AMG SL55. Often, one may find Yamauchi racing leisurely at the Twin Ring Motegi race track outside of Tokyo. The track at Motegi was also the testing ground for many of the cars featured in the Gran Turismo offerings.

In 1993, Yamauchi began his career in the game industry, the same year Sony Computer Entertainment was established. At that time, Yamauchi’s role was to create games for the new PlayStation® game console, to be released in Japan the following year. Since 1993, Yamauchi has created Motortoon Grand Prix (one of the Japanese PlayStation launch titles in 1994), Motortoon Grand Prix 2 (1996), Gran Turismo (1997), Omega Boost (1999), Gran Turismo 2 (1999), Gran Turismo 3 (2001) Gran Turismo Concept (Japanese/European release), Gran Turismo 4 Prologue (Japanese/European release), Gran Turismo 4 (2005), Tourist Trophy (2006), Gran Turismo HD Concept (2006).

Growing up in the city of Kashiwa, Japan in Chiba prefecture, Yamauchi was a role model school boy who dreamed of becoming an astronaut. At the time, he was interested in the motion picture industry and in Junior High School, he established a movie production group, making one film a year. At one point, he wished he could create a movie like Star Wars. Yamauchi adds that Japan’s gaming industry is similar to Hollywood in the film industry.

As Yamauchi proceeded to High School, he explains that he was no longer the “cream of the crop”. In his years at University School, Yamauchi built his skills in graphic design, participating in part time jobs in preparing presentation materials for car manufacturers.

Nearly 10 years ago, Yamauchi began the Gran Turismo franchise with four people. Today, he is President of Polyphony Digital, which is comprised of more than 70 members, encompassing programmers, designers, artists and more. Yamauchi’s main responsibility is for the core game design and balancing of concepts, however, he has an ongoing open forum for suggestions from his team members that often can result in game design plans. The name ‘Polyphony’ is meant to suggest a place for polyphonic people and for their voices to mix with one another. Currently, Yamauchi and team are now preparing for the upcoming release of Gran Turismo 5 for PLAYSTATION®3.

Here are some more thoughts from Anthony Hanses of North America’s www.PSU.com; this time on the ‘path to success’:

The Path to Success

When a brand new console is released onto the gaming market, it is typically a very big occasion. People cheer or sneer, lines form, eBay makes a nice profit and the console sells like mad. This was no different with the release of the PS3 this past holiday season.

What occurs afterwards is what will determine the console’s place in history.Will it go on to sell record numbers and entertain million and millions around the world? Will it sell a decent amount only to be forgotten in years gone by and after newer and better systems are released? Will it live up to its promises, surpass them, or wallow in guilt and grief?

Make no mistake, even coming off a record number of sales with the PS2, Sony has a very hard road ahead of it. No company in the history of gaming has won three generations in a row. Usual paths to downfall include pride and arrogance. Nintendo at one point had over 90% market share, only to drop to just 60% the following generation and lose the lead to Sony the next at roughly 30%. The gaming industry is one of the toughest to compete in. What may seem obvious years later could have been a great idea at the time.

For a quick point of reference, let us consider Nintendo’s choice to stick with game cartridges in the N64 instead of using an optical disc media. While most would argue that this is what really killed Nintendo that generation, many will insist to this day that Nintendo should have been able to tell that it was such a bad idea. Yet here we sit just about a decade later and history has repeated itself, but with Nintendo winning. Sony decided to go with UMD optical media for the PSP while Nintendo chose the faster loading, lower power usage cartridge for the DS. At the end of the day, Nintendo chose wisely and has since gone on to release the most successful gaming device in history (or well on its way to that point).

There are never clear answers as to what hardware will eventually win, but one thing is universal: if you fail to sell your game console you will lose. More importantly, if you fail to sell it in the first twelve months after the launch holiday, you will lose. This is even more compounded if you are not out before your primary competition.

When the SNES came out, it was up against two years worth of Genesis sales. Even with its broad library of well known characters and titles, Nintendo had a mountain to climb. Nintendo had to sell enough systems in that first year to prove that it could eventually overtake the Genesis. Failure to do so could have resulted in what exclusives remained on the SNES going away, or worse, going exclusive to the Genesis.

Nintendo had to release the SNES and sell more in its first twelve months than the Genesis sold in its third set of twelve months. This meant selling close to ten million systems in their first year in a generation where the market was only 60% of what it is today. This would prove their ability to overcome the Genesis at some point in its life and thus reassure producers and developers that the SNES was the right platform for their game to release on to maximise sales potential.

Needless to say, the SNES succeeded. Even though, it still took four years for the SNES to pass the Genesis in total sales.

Now back onto the PS3. Sony has just passed through their first holiday. Generally speaking, even bad systems have sold out pretty much all they could produce in the first holiday season. Now Sony needs to prove to publishers and developers that they will once again own the game console market. As they resolve their shortage issues they will have to have a successful launch in Europe followed up by consistent system sales for the first nine months of 2007. Sony’s sales in 2007 have to exceed that of Microsoft’s and Nintendo’s sales for the same twelve months, though the first nine are truly vital. Right now developers and publishers are choosing which system(s) they will release their games on for the 2008 and 2009 years. Failure to reassure the developers now will result in a shortage of exclusives or releases in general during the following years.

In order to pull this off, Sony will have to sell more systems than their competitors during the next twelve months. To determine how many they will have to sell, we will look at a bit of history and make a few educated guesses.

Typically speaking, during a console’s second year on market they have a price drop and an increased quantity of system selling titles resulting in roughly a 30% increase in system sales over the previous twelve months. Thus, you have the start of the bell curve appearance to a console lifetime sales. If we take the Xbox360 and its twelve months worth of sales in 2006 without taking into account the 2005 holiday sales, it sold approximately 8.5 million systems. Increase this by 30% and you end up with about 11 million systems to be sold in the next twelve months. Being that the Xbox360 is expected to sell minimal units in Japan, Sony will have to take that into account and plan for increased sales to make sure that they sustain leadership in the EU and US markets. Since Japan is approximately 28% of the worldwide market, we will increase the sales required to approximately 14 million systems.

So, at the end of the day, Sony will likely have to sell 14+ million systems during 2007. Figuring that 5 million are likely to sell with ease during the holiday rush in 2007 (October, November and December) and one million will sell with ease at the European launch of the PS3 in March, that leaves Sony with 8 million to sell in the remaining nine months. That is approximately 900,000 units per month. Europe is historically slower to pick up new consoles at their launch price, instead preferring to wait for price reductions - thus we will estimate a bit lower for sales each month for 2007 for Europe.

The likely monthly sales differential between the territories that will allow Sony to succeed is

300,000 Japan
300,000 US
200,000 Europe

If Sony can manage these sales levels, they will likely maintain their lead in the market and maintain most of their remaining exclusives. They may even pick up some new exclusives or reduce the exclusives of their competitors by convincing developers to release their titles cross platform. Failure to do so could cost them the market; if not this generation, then during the next one.

How soon will we be able to tell? Realistically, not until early 2008. But, we should start getting an idea shortly. If Japanese weekly sales show less than 50,000 systems sold per week consistently through the first 3 months of 2007, Sony is in trouble. If the US shows less than 200,000 systems sold per month for the first three months of 2007, Sony is in trouble. Europe is all but impossible to track externally, so we unfortunately will be unable to determine results based on Europe at this time.

What does history tell us about Sony’s ability to meet these goals? Historically speaking they should not have any issues. Unfortunately history does not currently take into account Sony’s price point on the PS3. Will consumers be able to afford or choose to afford the high price, or will they opt instead for the Xbox360 and/or Wii. On this point history does provide a limited amount of guidance.

Back in April of 2004 Microsoft dropped the price of the Original Xbox by $50 to $150. This put them at a $30 price advantage to Sony’s $180 for the PS2. In the US, Microsoft capitalised on this by having their first month ever to beat Sony in monthly sales in the US. The following month Microsoft all but equaled Sony’s sales in the US. It wasn’t until the month after that when Sony reduced the PS2 price to $150 that they briefly took back the lead. For the rest of that year they were neck and neck on sales. All of this while it is clear that Sony was leading overall in quantity and quality of game releases on its platform and had not yet hit the saturation point.

If a $30 price difference can even the playing field between the definitive leader and a distant second place, what will a $100 price difference do? What will happen if Microsoft drops the price of the Xbox360 by an additional $50 and Sony is unable to match them?

These are all questions that we cannot answer at this time. Sony has the strongest gaming brand ever in the history of the gaming industry. To underestimate that brand’s potential to sell the PS3 at a higher price point would be foolish at best. But history has shown that even that brand could not entirely protect it from a $30 price difference.

Can Sony sell 800,000 systems a month right now?
Can Sony win with a $100+ price difference with its nearest competitor?
Will history repeat itself?

We are currently living in the best point of competition ever in the gaming industry. Never before have three contenders been all able to make it through an entire generation and all survive to move onto the next. Never before have we ever been looking at the realistic possibility of a statistical three-way tie in market share.

It’s good to be a gamer.

Another question that was recently put to Three Speech:

Question: ‘When will Sony release an adapter that will let us use our Dual Shock controllers on the PS3 for when we play PS2 games that support force feedback, but don’t support motion sensing?’

Answer from PlayStation: ‘While we have no plans to produce our own adaptor at present, a third party company (Nyko) have made the following announcement - http://kotaku.com/gaming/nyko/ps3-charging-base-ps2-controller-adapter-coming-226995.php..’

Here’s the new F1 footage we’ve been promising…

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Hi Res

Some images of GT-HD for you…

For a good blast of insight into how stupidly real life-like GT-HD looks set to be, check out this vid. Some of the cornering sequences look particularly impressive, as a Mitsubishi Lancer gets given a right hammering.

This video had been put out to promote the fact that you can download a free one level demo of GT-HD from the PlayStation Store. Currently this is available in Japan and North America. We’re told by SCEUK that this demo should be available from launch date in the UK/Europe as well.

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Hi Res