European PlayStation 3 Network: It’s Alive!

According to a series of postings on a Neogaf forum, the European PlayStation 3 Network (and Store) is reachable and downloads were available today - some three days before the consumer launch of the PS3 itself.

The initial posting, appears to come from a Belgian user called Goldrusher and includes the picture shown on the right of this story. The on-screen text is very obviously not in either American English nor Japanese (nor any version of Chinese that might be spoken in Singapore that we’re aware of). In short, it’s either a well-mocked-up European screen, or a true European screen.

Of course, we immediately headed to our precious PlayStation 3 in order to leap on and look at the wondrous goodness laid out in the Neogaf posting:



We were met with a live login procedure for the PS3 ‘Friends’ system but no Network/Store. We then spoke with a Sony representative who was as confused as ourselves about why a consumer network would be open to consumers, none of whom would yet own a retail PlayStation 3.

Our unnamed source at Sony commented, “As far as we’re concerned it won’t go live until launch. And that’s got to be a debug machine not retail. We’re probably just testing the network.”

On returning to the relevant posting it appears that not only was the network up and then down, but that one of the people able to download content from it was based in Japan. So, PS3 Stores are indeed accessible from locales other than that in which the PlayStation was purchased.

Still, from the look of the posted shot, and the fact that at least for a moment, the PS3 network was up and running, it seems that Sony’s online presence is good to go in time for March 23rds launch.

It’s also got to be said that our experience of online gameplay was – overall – very positive indeed.

^{Source: Neogaf}