During an interview with Game Informer, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Andrew House spoke about the launch of the PlayStation 4 and what’s planned for the rest of 2013. The system, which launched last week in the United States, will be available in 32 territories by the end of the year.
While it may be difficult to find a PlayStation 4 at the moment, House is confident that demand should be met through the holiday season:
“[This is] the first platform launch that I’ve ever been involved with where we’ve had such a good production ramp up and a good sense of supply. I think that we will be in good supply in the countries that we’ve launched in. We are ensuring that we have the broadest reach to ensure that people are satisfied, especially when they’ve been loyal to brand for so long. On the other hand, we’re not engendering frustration by having a shortage of supply. I think through the holiday season that we’ll be in good supply. The sales target that I announced for the company is five million units sold by the end of our fiscal year. March 31, 2014.”
With news coming out that the PlayStation 4 has already sold over 1 million units in the United States alone, it’s not terribly surprising that that there is a slight shortage already. Of course, if you followed either the launch of the previous console generation or the launch of the PlayStation 2, you would be aware that this tends to happen when a new system is released.
Regardless, as someone who was looking to acquire the system by the end of 2013, it’s nice to hear that House and Sony plan to continue to pump out the PlayStation 4 in hopes of avoiding a mass shortage and forcing consumers to purchase over-priced consoles on the second-hand market. It will be good for all parties involved to get more systems out to stores as soon as possible and I hope that Sony sticks to their guns on this one.
Tell us, do you think Sony will be able to properly fulfill demand for the PlayStation 4 through out the rest of 2013? Or are we due for another shortage issue like what happened with the Nintendo Wii back in 2006? Let us know in the comments section below.