PlayStation 3 arriving in Europe this Friday

PlayStation 3 arriving in Europe this Friday

Sony is due to release their Playstation 3 gaming console in the European markets this coming Friday. The console is already launched in the North American market and would hit India sometime next month.

Jim Batchelor, entertainment head at Britain’s Woolworths’ department store spoke about this upcoming launch: “The launch of Playstation 3 will be the biggest video games console launch of all time. It will be bigger than the launch of the Nintendo Wii, the Xbox 360 and the previous Playstation.”

Sources say that the company is going to make available around a million units in Europe at launch time. UK would get a shipment of 300,000 units. France would get 100,000 units.

Sony claims that as many as 60,000 of these units are pre-ordered. James Schall, videogames manager for Amazon.co.uk added: “Our initial stock of Nintendo Wiis sold out in just seven minutes but our initial allocation of PlayStation 3 has been considerably higher and we have seen very strong pre-order sales on this console.”

The company is unfortunately making available only the higher end model featuring a 60GB hard disk in the European market. Georges Fornay, the European vice-president of Sony Computer Entertainment spoke on this decision: “More than 90 percent of demand in Japan and the US is for this model.”