Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., the world’s leading supplier of gaming consoles, said on Tuesday that it had successfully shipped two million of its PlayStation 3 game consoles, about two weeks behind its own schedule. However, some analysts expressed concerns that customers are reluctant to buy game machines that cost $500 - $600 amid small amount of high quality games available for the PS3 now.

SCEI today revealed that it had supplied one million PlayStation 3 consoles to its customers in Japan, whereas on the 8^th of January it indicated that it managed to ship one million of units to its partners in North America region, thus, the company managed to make available two million PlayStation 3 game consoles about two weeks after its own target for the milestone – by the end of 2006.

Nevertheless, undersupplies may not be the only problem for the PlayStation 3. Masayuki Otani, deputy chief of research at Maruwa Securities, reportedly told Associated Press news-agency that PS3 sales “were struggling in Japan with excess stock languishing at retailers”. Back in December some observers in the USA also indicated that customers were unwilling to pay for premium sets of bundles that included PlayStation 3s.

NPD Research, an independent market tracking agency, recently indicated that back in December there were shipped 1.132 million Xbox 360 game consoles, 604 thousand Nintendo Wii game machines and 490.7 thousand Sony PlayStation 3 much-anticipated game consoles in the USA. The same market tracking agency revealed earlier that in November end-users acquired 195 thousand PlayStation 3 machines. Thus, about 685 thousand of the PS3 game consoles were bought by end-users in calendar 2006, starting from November 17, or about 115 thousand a week. Meanwhile, Sony made available over 140 thousand of PS3s a week on average.

“The launch has a lot of problems, but things could pick up with time,” Mr. Otani is reported to have said.

Despite of missed targets, Sony reportedly further stressed about ability to ship 6 million PS3 game consoles by late March, 2007.

Sony PlayStation 3 console is based on the Cell processor developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the RSX graphics chip by Nvidia Corp. and will be equipped with Blu-ray optical disk drive. There are two versions of the PlayStation console available: one is equipped with 20GB hard disk drive and priced at $499, another features 60GB hard drive, card reader and some other improvements and is offered for $599.