Sony has boasted over a million PlayStation 4 consoles sold during the new machine’s first day of sale alone, and that figure is climbing ever higher by the day, but it’s important to remember that these are just the numbers for North America, and European gamers still have a little while (make that a long while if you’re Japanese, but let’s not rub salt in the wound) to wait until they get to throw cash in Sony’s direction and make the PS4 their own.
It turns out, though, that unlike the millions of units shipped to the US in recent weeks, which were mostly made in China, there’s a good chance that the consoles European gamers will be snapping up come November 29 were in fact made in Sony’s homeland, Japan.
Photos emerged in the last few hours on a handful of gamer sites and forums such as NeoGAF, showing European PlayStation 4 packaging and the unit itself, both clearly marked “Made in Japan”. These units are for sale within Europe only.
The console’s innards will of course be exactly the same as those released in North America, and despite the fact that rumours that defective units sold in the US may be the result of a disgruntled Foxconn employee in China sabotaging consoles are entirely unsubstantiated, many are now wishing they’d been able to pick up one of the PlayStation 4s made in Japan. Why? Because of “good old Japanese workmanship” and “Glorious Nippon engineering”.
We have to admit, even with one of the largest electronics manufacturers in China building PS4s faster than the eye can see, we wondered how Sony was producing enough units to meet demand for a near simultaneous launch in two such vast territories – turns out a lot of these Japan-made machines were earmarked for Europe. Not that Japanese gamers will be especially pleased to hear that consoles they won’t be able to buy until February next year were being built right on their doorsteps and shipped abroad the whole time…