Playstation 2 volumes may lag Sony targets
By Yoshiko Hara, EE Times
Feb 23, 2000 (1:47 PM)
URL: eetimes.com
MAKUHARI, Japan ? With the introduction of its Playstation 2 only two weeks away, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCE) held the Playstation Festival 2000 this past weekend in Makuhari near Tokyo, where the Playstation 2 and nearly 30 game titles were displayed for trial play for the first time. But industry attention is focusing on whether SCE will be able to produce the complex chips used in Playstation 2 in sufficient volume for the gaming console's March 4 launch in Japan. Playstation 2 employs the Emotion Engine, which features about 13 million transistors, and the single-chip Graphic Synthesizer, with about 47 million transistors. SCE declared at the rollout of the Playstation 2 last September that it would supply one million units of the console in its first week of availability.
But in a speech to open the festival here, Ken Kutaragi, president of SCE, did not confirm the one-million-unit figure. Instead, he said that "hardware production is in progress as scheduled. We can deliver substantial number of PS2 [Playstation 2] on March 4," Kutaragi said.
Server seizure
SCE had also been taking orders for Playstation 2 through the Internet, but ceased taking orders online after a few days because heavy traffic stopped the server. "We had too much access, more than expected," Kutaragi said. "At the beginning, we had 100,000 hits per minute, and the access went up to 400,000-to-500,000 hits per minute at the peak."
Some analysts doubt SCE will be able to supply one million units in the first week as planned. They said SCE was on schedule with device and component production, but that it was behind schedule on assembly.
At the festival, 28 game titles from 18 software houses were available for play on 500 Playstation 2 units. Ten of those titles will be available for sale on March 4. The other titles were prototypes and are still under development.
Developer tribulations
Software developers said they were facing trials and tribulations because of the new chips. "The performance of chips is very high," said Yoshiki Okamoto of Kapcon, a leading game software house in Japan. "We could have made use of about half of their performance."
Jim |
