Thursday, January 05, 2006

Sony and the PS3 at CES

Sony apparently made the PSP the center of their Consumer Electronics Show (CES) presentation at their press preview yesterday.

This means that if Sony still plans on hitting their March release date in Japan for the PS3, they're roughly twelve weeks away and have shown almost no in-game footage of the unit. I've never seen anyone launch a product like that. Maybe Sony can get away with it, but my guess is that they're far behind their initial estimates in terms of launch dates.

And in terms of being behind, there were two posts over at Kotaku that I can't verify are credible, but they certainly seem plausible, given what Sony has been showing the last few months, which is basically nothing.
http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/ps3/rumor-ps3-riddled-with-issues-delay-likely-145801.php
http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/ps3/more-dirt-on-the-ps3-problems-145977.php

However, on the positive side, Sony is apparently going to code Japan and the U.S. as the same region for the PS3. This means that we can play games from Japan on a U.S. console. It's about time someone did that.

In other Sony news, they've apparently settled one of the lawsuits against them. Thanks to Dave Reite for sending me a link to the .pdf of the proposed settlement, which you can find here:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ihs/alex/sonysettleme23423423434nt.pdf.

And if you want a quick summary of the agreement, here's a good one:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1052&Itemid=89&nsub=.

Sony desperately wants this to go away. Quickly.

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