Via Joystiq: You'd think that after waiting for roughly five months longer than the rest of the world, European retailers would be able to wait a couple more days to start selling their one million stockpiled PS3s. Apparently not, though, as an Italian retailer has broken Sony's carefully planned street date, causing a domino effect in other other stores across the country. GamesIndustry.biz reports that small specialist chain Darty took out ads for a 7 p.m. Wednesday PS3 sale in advance of the official Friday launch. Competitor Media World responded by canceling midnight sales plans and letting its stock loose at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning (or roughly seven and a half hours ago, Italy time, as of this posting). Italy's GameStop stores are currently planning to stick to the street date, but said they might be forced to break it to stay competitive. Sony, for its part, is "deeply disappointed by the unilateral decision" to launch early and is "carefully consider[ing] all available options in relation." Unilateral decisions? Retaliation? Is this the console war or the Iraq war?

If you were certain that a product you were selling was in high demand (and was going to sell out) why would you release early? Why would you risk facing the consequences from one of your suppliers? (The standard threat with books/movies/games I'm told is that you will no longer recieve copies in the launch week) ...

Well if everyone is doing it I'm sure Sony will let go the big boys that just followed suit. The people that started it will have to pay though. About why they'd want to do it look at Gamestop for example I'm sure it's making them look bad not selling it with everyone else. I'd understand what they were doing but I'd be really pissed knowing that I had to wait longer when I preordered a month ago at my trusted game store, and planed on staying up at midnight just to have everyone own the system days before me. And I'm the guy who gets it. The people that don't will just be ticked off with gamestop. There also probably getting 8 million phone calls about it. And if everyone and their mother broke the agreement then how can Sony punish everyone?

Well, the initial store that broke the date can pretty much forget about getting any significant amount of any high demand Playstation products from now on. Not only that, I'm sure they will be fined heavily as well. Real dumb move on their part. A dumb move that will cost them more than the few days extra days of sales will gain them. Sony will make sure that they happen to come up short on product this upcoming holiday season.

They really messed themselves up, I never thought about it like that.