by Playfuls Staff |
23rd March 2007
Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) gaming console was launched across Europe at midnight Friday as the company takes on competition from Nintendo and Microsoft.
In Germany, the [more] PlayStation 3 made its debut at Berlin's Sony Centre, a downtown commercial building complex where the principal tenant is Sony Europe's corporate headquarters.
Sony took over the glass-roofed plaza next to Potsdamer Platz for a pre-launch party for the waiting fans.
"It was packed. We couldn't get anyone else in," said a Sony spokesman, Guido Alt, adding that 700 invitees and 2,500 fans showed up to hear a concert by boyband US5, German rapper Sido and US band Good Charlotte.
Bastian Schwewiola, the first Berlin buyer, told TV crews, "My dream has come true," as he emerged grinning from a ground-floor Sony shop and headed home to play non-stop till breakfast time.
Another buyer was not so lucky. He was robbed at gunpoint by two men who made off with his PlayStation just after he bought it, German police said.
Around Germany, many electronics marts used exemptions from trading-hours laws to stay open past midnight to satisfy the fans' urgent demands.
Buyers of the PlayStation 3 were unfazed by the fact that, at 600 euros, the product is far more expensive than the rival game consoles, the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Xbox 360.
Because of a shortage of blue lasers needed for the Blu-Ray optical disk drive, European buyers had to wait longer than North American and Asian customers, who received their consoles last year.
Some customers were annoyed that Sony removed a special computer chip from the European version which would have allowed it to operate games from the preceding model, the PlayStation 2. Sony said this was to save costs, but it was "working on" backwards compatibility.
In the British capital London everyone who bought a PS3 also received a 46-inch high definition television and a taxi home.
In the French capital Paris the midnight launch attracted only about 100 aficionados to stores on the Champs Elysees.
Another 50 video game fans boarded a boat hired by Sony and the retail chain FNAC and anchored on the Seine River near the Eiffel Tower to buy one of the 1,000 PS3's put on sale there.
The event was a far cry from the reaction to the launch of the PlayStation 2 in 2000 when, as one witness put it, "the people fought each other to get one."
Many believe that the PS3's steep price was the reason for the relatively disappointing response to its long-anticipated launch.
According to Pierre Cuilleret, head of the retail chain Micromedia, the success of the PS3 "will be decided in the coming months."
