I swear the ongoing saga of the PS3 launch gets more and more interesting every day. The latest update comes as financial analysts Merrill Lynch predicted that the PS3 won’t make a spring launch (shock!), and that the manufacturing cost will hit $800. This slightly uninspiring news was quickly followed by a statement from Sony which claims that it’s all rubbish and it’ll be out in the spring. Still uninspiring, but things get more interesting when Sony apparently also told the BBC in this report that hardware issues could force a delay.

Thinking about this, the spring begins in early March which is a couple of weeks away. From that time they have until late May – a period of three months – to make that launch window. It’s not going to happen. This is why:

• We don’t have a solid release date.
• We don’t have a solid price.

Those two are pretty essential for a major hardware launch, don’t you think? Or are people going to walk into Akihabara one day and find the PS3 in stock with price available on application? Not to mention these other important facts that need to be considered:

• The hardware design and controller haven’t been finalised.
• The final hardware features that it’ll be able to do out of the box haven’t been released.
• They haven’t even shown in-game footage of any games whatsoever. Some of the demos are apparently real time, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a corresponding game that looks like that.
• Nobody outside Sony and a handful of developers has even played the thing.
• There isn’t a major show at which to announce the details of it until E3 in May.

Considering all that there’s no way in hell that we’ll see it anywhere in the next three months. I’d like Sony to prove me wrong there but it was a pretty impressive turnaround for Microsoft to go from finally unveiling the details of the 360 to release in six months and look how that went. I’m sure I speak for everyone here when I say that we just want them to come out and let us know what’s going on. Come on, Sony!

Apparently Sony are now saying that the PS3 is not yet ready for market, without actually telling us when it will be. That’s what you think. The quote is actually telling us exactly when the PS3 will be coming out:

“Our No. 1 competition is not other companies but counterfeiters. We want to work with governments to stop this.”

So it’s coming out when they manage to stop piracy. I can only assume that it means, therefore, that the PS3 is never coming out. The Xbox 360 has won before the first shot has been fired, and Sony are teh d00med. It’s all in their secret code, I tell you.