Revolution to launch in June?

There have been fresh rumours that a June launch for the Revolution is possible. A few days ago, Business Week quoted an analyst, who seemed to lend credence to the story by speculating about what would happen:

"There are rumors that the Revolution could be released as early as June," says Akiteru Itoh of Tokyo-based game-research outfit Media Create. "If that happens, and Nintendo sells around 1 million units, Sony would have a harder time catching up."

Now, SPOnG has reminded us that they had an exclusive story last year to the same effect. They now give us a bit more background about how their story came about:

Senior sources within Nintendo and its close partners assured us it was the case. To add a bit of rare background to this piece, at the time the news broke on SPOnG, we were aware that several games media outlets in Japan had been briefed either casually off the record or under terms of non-disclosure that Nintendo's internal target and that of its partners was June 2006.

Over the course of several meetings, a long-time SPOnG mole was made privy to these plans, prompting the investigation into Revolution launch plans and netting the comments published above.

However, I briefly spoke to a very senior German Nintendo rep today who asked me if I had heard those rumours. I said that I was aware of them. He replied that he would be very surprised if that turned out to be true. Now, I am not saying that Nintendo couldn´t pull off a June launch without telling senior staff here in Europe, but that would be very strange nonetheless.

Bear in mind that I spoke to someone very senior at Nintendo of Europe, not just Germany. If he didn´t know, when would he be able to plan the European launch strategy, talk to major European retailers, mobilize his PR machine and so on?

EDIT Oh, and I was also told that there probably won´t be huge news at Iwata´s GDC keynote. We´ll find out tomorrow.

Sources: Business Week, SPOnG