After the embarrassment of having lots of stock left on the shelves in America, if the early pre-order stakes are anything to go by then the situation is set to be much of the same in Europe as well.

As of the time of writing, Amazon.co.uk still has pre-order allocations left for the PS3, even though they opened more than a week ago. When the Wii went up for pre-orders last year the story was very different – seeing ALL Wiis go in less than 7 minutes. The Xbox 360 wasn’t far behind it either the year before.

It’s much the same situation over at Play.com too, and they even state on their website that the button to “buy” will be removed once their allocation has been reached. The button is still there and very clickable.

So what’s going on in Europe? Is the PS3 too expensive? Have people already spent all their pennies on Wiis at Christmas? Or have Sony allocated a lot more PS3 units to Europe than we expected?

Do people just not buy into the Sony philosophy any more? We’ll just have to wait and see.