Hoping to get your hands on a PlayStation 4? Have you been waiting since November 15th to get the next generation of PlayStation home entertainment lodged securely in your living room? Well, then you're out of luck... until April.
According to the UK's MCV, Sony doesn't have a lot of faith in the supply of their PS4 units until mid-spring.
PlayStation UK and Ireland boss Fergal Gara commented to MCV that...
“I can’t work it out precisely. But based on what I’ve seen so far, I think it is going to be tricky until around about April. You might get a fortnight or a week here or there where it is more available, but we should be back to free supply by about April,”“That’s our best guess. It might be a little earlier than that, or it might be a little later. But we’ll get there.”
Of course you will, Gara... of course you will.
The Now In Stock page for PS4 also seems to reconfirm Gara's statements, as if all the empty shelves at local retailers wasn't proof enough.
The PlayStation 4 has been cleaning up as far as sales go. Everything Sony has shipped has been sold. The company recently stated that the PlayStation 4 has moved more than 5.3 million SKUs since launch.
Things are expected to skyrocket for Sony once more, as the PlayStation 4 has just recently launched in Japan and – according to DualShockers – the system managed to sell out in the land of the rising sun within minutes of becoming available for pre-order. It probably won't take long for the retail shelves in Japan to empty of the PS4, too.
The console gained a massive following thanks to the countless blunders executed at the hands of Microsoft's decision makers. This resulted in the PS4 becoming a beacon of light in an era that could have been masked in darkness by the Micro 'S'. The pre-orders were off the charts, the excitement was through the roof and the hype picked up enough steam and speed to make Japan's own Maglev L0 bullet-train look like it was moving in slow motion.
Gara commented on the PS4's rapid sales rate, stating...
“PS4 pre-orders were obviously a strong indicator of what was going to happen, but they were so big that we were pinching ourselves and wondering if people were pre-ordering in more than one place, and if some of these pre-orders were real.”“We were getting numbers we never imagined, let alone seen before. But it proved to be real. How do I reconcile that? I think the world has changed since we launched PS3.”
While Sony is still trailing behind the current market leader of the eighth gen, the Wii U, it's catching up at a lightning fast pace and at a rate rivaled only by the speedy destruction of Lindsay Lohan's acting career.
And even if $400 seemed like a deterrent for some consumers, apparently gamers are truly speaking with their wallets, despite Gara believing that the changing landscape of the tech sector has more to do with it, noting...
“The price differential between PS3 and PS4 is not nearly as a big as it was between PS2 and PS3. But you are also talking about a public that has become used to regular technology upgrades on reasonably expensive devices, likes tablets and smartphones. So there is a comfort level with upgrading that meant consumers were ready earlier and there was a pent-up demand that we couldn’t anticipate. It’s been a pleasant surprise.”
I tend to disagree. Look at the nearest PS4 competitor... the Xbox One. A lot of gamers don't feel the $500 upgrade is worth it.
Sadly, Microsoft is still having trouble getting those 900,000 Xbox One units off store shelves and it's in stock just about everywhere, so it's unlikely they'll be catching up any time soon, and it certainly doesn't show that a premium price is something majority of gamers are willing to accept for hardware that has trouble hitting 1080p at 60fps.
