Comment: PlayStation 3 is back in the game

Watching the reaction to Sony's announcements about the PlayStation 3 yesterday, we couldn't help wondering if the planets have just aligned for Sony in a particularly favourable way - or if this has been one of the most finely stage managed corporate information releases in history.

In case you missed the announcements themselves, the news is simple. PlayStation 3 is going to launch in early November in every worldwide territory - yes, including Europe - and the company is planning to have six million units on the market by the end of March 2007. Final development kits will be shipping in mid-May; there'll be a free and fully-featured online service from day one; the system will have a 60Gb hard drive by default, with strong hints that larger drives may also be available.

In the context of such a flood of information, and such an optimistic promise regarding the global launch timeline, nobody really seems to care that Sony is going to miss its target of launching the system in Spring 2006. Indeed, while Ken Kutaragi apologised profusely, in typically Japanese style, for the huge amount of speculation which has surrounded the PS3 launch plans, you can't help but feel that it's played right into their hands. Analysts confidently predicting that launches in some territories would slip to 2007, publishers expressing concern about the console not hitting Christmas, and the widespread belief that any Spring or Summer launch would be utterly hobbled by a complete dearth of stock for retailers to actually sell, had contributed to an atmosphere of gloom about the PS3's prospects in 2006. By alleviating the gloom caused by that speculation, Sony actually managed to make the announcement of a slippage sound like a positive thing. The stock markets certainly thought so, anyway - they pushed videogames stocks up significantly in the wake of the news of the launch date.

Of course, announcing a global launch is easy - actually executing on one is incredibly difficult, and there are two negative factors that need to be brought into consideration here. The first is the Xbox 360, which last Christmas ripped the heart out of some sectors of games retail by executing a global near-simultaneous launch which left every territory (aside from Japan) with hardly any units to sell. Pre-orders remained unfulfilled, money that should have been ringing through retail tills stayed firmly in gamers' pockets or was spent on other, non-games items, and overall it was hard to come away from the whole affair without thinking that if you can't do a global launch properly, you're better off just sticking to the easy option of a nice, staggered launch.

So a global simultaneous launch is difficult - to the point where Microsoft's Peter Moore was heard to opine that the software giant might never have tried to pull one off if it had known how hard it would be. But if Microsoft knows that, Sony should know it twice as well - because with PlayStation Portable, it promised just such a launch and ended up with a European launch running nine months behind the Japanese date, having found itself with insufficient units to satisfy even the demand in Japan on the originally proposed date of the worldwide launch.

PlayStation Portable, in summary, was a launch disaster by comparison with which even the Xbox 360 shortages look like a flawlessly executed plan. The question is, have Sony learned the right kind of lessons from this - or will the proposed November launch of the PS3 somehow turn into September 2007 in Europe and give Microsoft a headstart of almost two years in the marketplace?

For now, it's almost impossible to say - but it's worth pointing out that a number of factors suggest that Sony Computer Entertainment has, indeed, emerged from the PSP fiasco as an older and wiser company.

Consider that the PlayStation 3, when it launches in November - IF it launches in November - will have had one of the longest gestation periods of any console. Early development kits for the system, which most of those working with the kits described as being surprisingly advanced for such early hardware, shipped over a year ago, and the absolutely final development kits - featuring production models of the Cell processor, RSX graphics part, Blu-Ray drive and so on - will be on their way to developers in mid-May, giving them a massive five months of working with final hardware and libraries before they have to ship launch titles.

For developers, that's a huge amount of breathing room, and it means that some of the launch titles in November will have been in full production for around 18 months - quite a lot longer than most console launch titles. For the rest of us, what this means is twofold. It means better launch titles, almost certainly - sure, they'll probably still be a bit on the derivative tick-the-boxes side of things, but at least they'll be polished. More importantly, what this means is that by mid-May, Sony expects to have final versions of every component in the PS3 to give to developers.

Once you have final versions of components to put in development kits, in effect, your console is finished - which means that leaked reports from manufacturing firms earlier this week indicating that Sony will start producing PlayStation 3 consoles in June are probably entirely accurate. In other words, this won't be another PlayStation Portable style mess where units are shoved out onto the market while the manufacturing plants are still limping their way up to full production; Sony has given itself five months to build up launch stocks of the console, and more importantly, to iron out production issues and get its factories cranking out consoles at a million units a month.

Much of this, admittedly, is conjecture - but we know the timeline for the development hardware and software, and huge amounts of information can be inferred from that data. All of it points to a PS3 launch which will be unlike anything we've seen from Sony previously, and a company which has learned bitter lessons from the miserable failure of its best-laid plans with the PlayStation Portable. Only time will tell if the company can really apply those lessons and execute on its ambitious plans - but for now, the enthusiasm of the stock market is understandable. Microsoft has an undeniable head-start, but as of this week, the market leader is back in the game.