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PS4 will remain in short supply until around April, predicts Sony.

The new console has been a huge success for the platform holder. According to UK retailers, PS4 is the best-selling games machine this year so far, and since January has sold around double the number of units of its nearest competitor – Xbox One.

PlayStation UK and Ireland boss Fergal Gara admitted to MCV that the performance has defied the company’s expectations, but hopes retailers will have free-supply of the console before the summer.

I can’t work it out precisely. But based on what I’ve seen so far, I think it is going to be tricky until around about April. You might get a fortnight or a week here or there where it is more available, but we should be back to free supply by about April,” said Gara.

That’s our best guess. It might be a little earlier than that, or it might be a little later. But we’ll get there.”

On the success of the console so far, he added: PS4 pre-orders were obviously a strong indicator of what was going to happen, but they were so big that we were pinching ourselves and wondering if people were pre-ordering in more than one place, and if some of these pre-orders were real.

We were getting numbers we never imagined, let alone seen before. But it proved to be real. How do I reconcile that? I think the world has changed since we launched PS3.

The price differential between PS3 and PS4 is not nearly as a big as it was between PS2 and PS3. But you are also talking about a public that has become used to regular technology upgrades on reasonably expensive devices, likes tablets and smartphones. So there is a comfort level with upgrading that meant consumers were ready earlier and there was a pent-up demand that we couldn’t anticipate. It’s been a pleasant surprise.”