If so, they would be shooting themselves in the foot.

Every unit less they sell, they lose out on the money that customer would have spent on software, and it gives MS that extra chance of competing.

I highly doubt it.

The best I can think of is they shifted what they had to US and UK where titanfall and xbox is strongest and just make other countries wait longer instead.

Every pubsliher and business person worth a damn knows it's the right thing to do. You withold stock for big releases or advertising. It's how you build the most buzz about your product. It's not like they're witholding a ton of stock. Most of it is done in cooperation with retailers. I know that when I worked in retail, we got Wiis all the time and held them in the back for days because we needed to save for Sundays.

Or a new Crash game. Both of them are *most likely* going to come out sooner or later!

By market?

JP: Demand met, no stock issues
NA: Some stock issues, but normalizing this month
EU: Least another couple months before stock is no issue there

I do not think Sony are holding out, I just think they were not prepared for such strong demand out of the gate.

Actually you are really underestimating the level of hype inherent to people thinking the console is constantly short on supply.

Sony doesn't have to ramp up supply yet. They are maximizing their current output and the hype that goes with it.

That said, I take it that hiring another manufacturer and their production facilities can't be done overnight. It would take several months to get another factory making PS4's to Sonys specifications.

Knack is already out tho.

Sure, they are definitely going to ship more when the big releases come, that's pretty much what I meant since most big releases come in the holidays. I'm just really curious what they're producing and what they're holding back at the moment. In the last 3 months of 2007 the Wii sold about 7mio consoles, if Sony wants the PS4 to do numbers in that ballpark this holiday season, then they're either already holding stock back for that or are going to seriously ramp up production (like double or something) in the second half of the year.

If that was the case, they would have had better sales during the Titanfall week.

Its sold out. Its just how it is. I dont think they have anything to gain from keeping stock.

Oh i know that, it's a simple method of stabilizing momentum and taking advantage of key events. My comment was primarily in reply to "There hasn't been any supply issues for months". 

A product that isn't at all supply constrained is always going to be on shelves. Of course, some stock will be held back for specific dates and events, but that's a way of ensuring your product sells as key times. If securing that stock requires you to be sold out during the rest of the week, then you obviously aren't meeting your total demand.

In simple terms, if you get 100 apples a week, but 200 people come in every week to buy one, then it doesn't matter which days you choose to prioritize, you obviously don't have enough stock to meet demand. That's what's happening with the PS4 (though not as badly as it did the Wii. That was a mess).

The way he worded his comment suggested that Sony in-fact do have all 200 apples to sell both on normal days and special ones (such as a major release), but have decided to hold back some of that stock for no apparent reason.

PS4 has very high performance GDDR5 memory and the fire at the hynix factory last year has cut production. The PS4 doesn't use cheap slow memory like the xbox one so is at a disadvantage in manufacturing. Both consoles use an identical sized AMD APU its just the xbox one removes 1/3rd of the graphics power so it can fit in 32MB of eSRAM. I doubt there is much difference in APU supply. Nothing else in the consoles is going to be hard to source.

I'm sure Sony will be more than happy when there are no supply constraints on GDDR5 memory as they will probably get a better price. They must be competing with graphic card manufacturers at the moment for GDDR5 memory.