The Playstation 3 finally goes on sale in Japan on Saturday with long queues expected as gamers attempt to get their hands on one of the 100,000 consoles available.

Sony have dropped the price of the lower end PS3 for the Japanese launch by 20% to 50,000 yen (Euro 330) in order to try and compete with Wii for the market share and are fully expecting the console to sell-out.

"I waited this long, and I’m not disappointed. I’m glad I waited," said Takayuki Yokozawa, a 27-year-old employee at a computer maker who owns the original PlayStation as well as its successor PlayStation 2.

Despite such enthusiasm, Sony will be losing money for some time on each PS3 sold because of the high costs for research and production that went into the highly sophisticated machine.

The Playstation 3 goes on sale in the United States on November 17th where an allocation of 400,000 units has been confirmed.