B3yond The Hype

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When I was in Japan a couple of weeks ago I decided to see how much the PlayStation 3 cost, just out of curiosity – I had no intention of buying one, honestly. However, once I’d done a little Yen to Pound converting in my head I realised that the 60GB, full fat PlayStation 3 cost the equivalent of £250 in Japan, compared to the £425 launch price in the UK! Realising that I was never likely to find the PS3 cheaper than this in the UK I duly slapped my Amex card down and walked away with Sony’s new baby – clearly there are no stock problems in Japan, since everywhere I went had loads of them.

Traditionally, the problem with buying games consoles from Japan is that you can only play Japanese games, unless you go to the trouble of chipping the machine to make it multi-region, but with the PS3 this isn’t a problem. Sony has decided to make all the games on the PS3 multi-region, so you can play any PS3 game from any region on any machine, no matter what territory it was purchased in. The other issue with importing consoles is that both Japan and the US use 100-110v power, so you need to purchase a step-down converter before plugging it into a UK mains socket, but not so with the PS3. Sony has decided to equip the PS3 with an internal power supply that will accept AC voltages from 100-240v, so I was able to plug my Japanese machine directly into my mains socket using a standard kettle lead. Things are made even easier when you turn the console on for the first time and are asked which language you prefer – with a simple click, everything in the menus switches to English and stays that way.

With this in mind I have to ask myself two questions. Why are we in the UK having to wait so long for a PS3 launch, when there is little or no modification needed to the hardware? And why are we in the UK having to pay so much more for a PS3, when there is little or no modification needed to the hardware?

Of course most of us in the UK are used to having to pay more than other countries for essentially the same product, but in this case the cost differential is staggering. Being expected to pay over 40 per cent more for a PS3 in the UK than Japanese consumers do is nothing short of an insult. Even if you tell yourself that you’re getting Blu-ray functionality for half the price of a standalone player, you’re still going to be left with a bad taste in your mouth when handing over your hard earned cash.

The worst part about this situation is that now I actually have a PlayStation 3 and have spent a decent amount of time with it, I’ve realised that it truly is an impressive bit of kit, and like Sony said, it really can do a lot more than just play games. I’ll be writing a full review of the PlayStation 3 in the next couple of weeks, once I’ve spent enough time with it to do the hardware justice. But spending time with a retail unit has definitely allayed some of my fears, and dispelled some of the cynicism that I was instilled with after first getting my paws on a PS3 at E3 last year.

Ultimately I’m in no doubt that the PlayStation 3 will be a success. There are enough hardcore PlayStation fans out there to get the ball rolling, and once the software selection has grown, and the price begins to drop, the user base will expand. For the time being though, the fact that Europe has been left out in the cold for four months, and then expected to pay through the nose for the privilege of waiting could mean that Sony’s entry into the next generation console race gets off to a shaky start.

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