Blame the popularity of Twitch for the lack of PS4 cameras

The reason it's so hard to find the PlayStation 4's camera is because Sony officials massively underestimated the demand that Twitch broadcasting from the console would create, PlayStation president of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida told Polygon.

"It was a total miscalculation by our marketing guys," Yoshida said.

To estimate the demand for a peripheral on a new console, he said, the team looked at which launch titles supported the PlayStation Camera. Then they looked at the sales projections for those games and calculated a predicted adoption rate of the camera.

"They came up with the initial demand in that conventional way and it was very, very low," he said. "Using the camera to broadcast yourself is much, much more fun they they thought and they didn't quite get it."

Ultimately, he said, that miscalculation of the popularity of Twitch broadcasting was to blame for the shortage.

Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. Is busily cranking up production on the cameras now, Yoshida said. They should be showing up in stores already, he added.

The shortage seemed to bottleneck sales of the peripheral, which Sony officials said had a 15 percent attach rate. That would mean about 900,000 of the estimated 6 million PS4 console owners purchased the camera.