14 DAY TRIAL // The team at Sony in charge of the PlayStation 4 and its associated hardware says that the popularity of the Twitch streaming app for the home console has led to a worldwide shortage for the camera associated with the platform.
The company has not anticipated the interest coming from gamers and is currently trying to get more devices in stores, but Shuhei Yoshida, the leader of the Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, says that shortages might continue for a while.
The PlayStation 4 camera has sold more than 900,000 units and currently has an attach rate of 15 percent.
Yoshida tells Polygon that the company’s marketing team has made a mistake when predicting sales numbers.
He states, “It was a total miscalculation by our marketing guys. They came up with the initial demand in that conventional way and it was very, very low.”
The problem was that potential demand was calculated by only taking into account the games that would use the PlayStation 4 camera, but failed to take into account how popular Twitch would become, with a quarter of all its traffic coming from the Sony console at one point.
The company has increased production and those who want a camera should be able to buy one in stores soon.
Yoshida adds, “Using the camera to broadcast yourself is much, much more fun than they thought and they didn’t quite get it.”
Twitch streaming is available on both next-gen home consoles and it allows gamers to show off the games they are playing and their own reactions.
It is part of the move, supported by both Sony and Microsoft, to make gaming-focused devices more social, increasing the ways in which a player can share content with his friends and with strangers.
Sony also makes it easier for PlayStation 4 users to get their screenshots on Twitter and other social networks.
The company has also promised that its upcoming firmware updates for the console will also introduce more social elements, although it has not yet offered any clear details.
The PlayStation 4 has managed to get past 6 million units sold earlier in the year, after a very solid launch in Japan, and is currently outselling the Xbox One from Microsoft both in the Europe and in the United States.
Sony announced at the Game Developers Conference that it was working on a new virtual reality headset for its platform, called Project Morpheus.