Sony's Harrison Discusses PS3 Launch Specifics

A feature on semi-official PlayStation 3 blog ThreeSpeech has discussed latest information on launch numbers and more in an interview with Sony Worldwide Studios head Phil Harrison. The feature again references “only 500,000 units available” for North American launch, but does not discuss any European launch numbers - Harrison does not comment on the figures directly, but admits, “There’s no denying that we’ve had some very public challenges. Today, it looks like a very difficult situation - but in the weeks, months and years to come, this will pale into zero.” Harrison also responded to a question asking why a HDMI port had been added to the cheaper 20GB hard drive version of the console at such short notice. After admitting that he didn’t know when the decision was made, he commented that “the reason for the change was in reaction to a market trend, which is that much more displays are being sold with HDMI, earlier, than had been previously forecast … I think that the unspoken assumption was that we would always merge everything into HDMI eventually. We just made that decision earlier.” When asked whether the late change to the hardware spec would have a negative impact on mass manufacture of the console, Harrison answered: “The critical question is not ‘when do you start manufacturing’, but ‘when do you start assembly’. The HDMI port - whether it’s enabled or not on the machine is an assembly issue, not a manufacturing issue.” Continuing with his unusually frank comments, Harrison ends by admitting that, “Yes, we have overreached in production of the Blu-Ray component - I can’t deny that. But that’s the price you pay for adopting brand new, leading-edge technologies that will be future proof. We will resolve those issues - we are already catching up. We will continue to catch up on the production, and as you know, we haven’t changed our full-year forecast of six million units.”