PS4 Release Date and Price: Japan Must Wait Until 2014, December for Other Asian Countries
The PS4 will be released in a handful of Asian countries by the end of the year while some others won't have the game console until 2014, according to Game Spot.
The Sony console will be available in North America Nov. 15, ahead of the black Friday rush. Europe will have the PS4 just two weeks after its release in the United States.
It will take the company a bit longer to have the platform ready to go in Asian nations, however. It will be released in December to South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, as well as the Hong Kong area. Ironically enough, Japanese-based Sony won't even have the PS4 available in Japan until February 22 of 2014.
It is believed that the later release for Japan is due to the extra work it takes to customize the game console to fit the "region-based content," according to Gamesided.com.
Although the Japanese version of the game console will not be ready until later, people in Japan will be able to purchase the console from other nations in the meantime.
The PS4 is gaining an edge over the Xbox One in this regard because Microsoft isn't going to be ready to expand to Asian until later in 2014, according to C Net Asia. In fact, the Xbox One is only currently going to be featured in 13 countries around the world.
Koki Shiraishi, who serves as an analyst at SNBC Nikko Securities, Inc., explained one of the possible reasons why Japan is getting placed on the backburner for now.
"The U.S. is a huge market that Sony does not want to miss" out on," he said to the Japan Times. "The PS4 is for core gamers and lots of core gamers are from the United States."