Iwata Suggests Revolution Global Launch Unnecessary

During the same interview conducted with Bloomberg News last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose that produced news on DS shortages, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata indicated that despite both Microsoft and Sony's next-generation console plans, Nintendo does not feel compelled to attempt a simultaneous worldwide launch of their upcoming Revolution console. "We don't think it's necessary to do the simultaneous worldwide launch simply because others are doing this, " said Iwata. Nintendo has said, however, that they plan to launch the Revolution in 2006, though no firm release date has yet been set. Expectations are high that the company will announce the system's future launch date during their pre-E3 press conference on May 9, and that it will launch before Thanksgiving in North America. Microsoft, who launched their Xbox 360 next-generation console on November 22, 2005, has since been unable to meet the worldwide demand of consumers. While Xbox 360 sales continue to be poor in Japan, with systems sitting idle on store shelves, elsewhere in the world consumers have been routinely turned away due to no systems being on hand to sell. Much of this shortage, according to Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, has to do with problems with chip yields on the console's key components. "We decided to go ahead and launch rather than wait until post-Christmas and get a few million units out into the hands of users. We're doing our best, “ commented Ballmer in a recent interview with the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. Sony appears to be on a similar path, having announced that they plan to release their upcoming PlayStation 3 platform globally within the first ten days of November. While the console was originally slated to ship this spring, it was delayed due to unspecified problems finalizing the specification of the Blu-ray drive. At a developer meeting earlier this month in Tokyo, Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken Kutaragi announced that Sony expected to have a production capacity of one million units a month by November and that the company expected to ship six million units by the end of March 2007 (implying as many as three million units worldwide for 2006).