Come November 15th, the PlayStation 4 is only scheduled to release in Canada and the United States. While we’ve covered Amazon.com constantly selling out of PS4s and GameStop USA running out of their unlimited supply, Canada has taken a bit of a backseat… until today.
During Fan Expo Canada last week, O.Canada caught up with Matt Levitan, Director of Marketing and Public Relations at Sony Computer Entertainment Canada, where he talked about allocation this holiday:
I think it will be hard to get PS4s, too, even though there will be four of five times the amount of product out there. Yeah, we had some issues with the PS3 out of the gate. I don’t remember the exact number but I think it was around 20,000 – 25,000 that we launched in Canada with the PS3. It’s significantly more than that for the PS4 and we’re sold out of pre-orders. So it’s promising, but we’re trying to not get too ahead of ourselves.
When comparing the system to the Xbox One and whether PS4 has an advantage due to announcing the release date first, Levitan mentioned how he thinks “that availability might play a much bigger factor than the actual date itself. I think who has the most product on the shelf will be more of a deciding factor of who wins the holiday. But this holiday isn’t as important as the ones down the road.”
Do you think availability on store shelves plays the bigger role this holiday? Were you surprised at the low number of PS3s Canada received at launch? Let us know in the comments below.
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