Order of the Consoles

This is slightly late news... was more yesterday and I haven't been on the net since writing it but... I wrote it so... it's getting published :-P

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OOTS has been awesome lately. I'm really enjoying the Elan-centric plot and the action sequences. Bard's rock.

In other news, Sony have announced again that it is *they* who have won the console war.

To recap, MSN News reported the 360 was Master of All at the end of November, based on two key figures:

a) There were more 360's sold World Wide than Wii's and PS3's put together.
b) The 360 had sold in greater number even exclusively looking at November sales.

'a' was due to their being 360's available for about 12 months already, though I found 'b' genuinely surprising. Still, at that stage of the game it was perhaps a little early to call victory.

After Christmas sales came and went, Sony announced they'd won, because while there were a little over 10 million 360's sold, and about 4 million Wii's sold, Sony had sold over 110 million units. Yup - a clear victory. This seems like a remarkable jump until you spot that this was not a claim of PS3 success, but of PS2 success. That's right, Sony publicly announced their own previous generation console beat their new one. I don't understand what the point of that announcement was - the PS2's success is well known without needing to remind us, but the PS2 is not a contender in generations line up. Having said that, it wasn't entirely off topic - they point out that the PS2 is still so popular that it sold better even in the last 2 months than any other console, shipping over 14 million units. With regards to it's popularity over it's younger cousin the PS3, it's probably due to there being games available for it, which so far seems to be a weak point of the Blue-Ray HD super machine.

But how's the PS3 doing? Well that'd bring us up to date, with today's news sprinkling 'PS3s massive success' over my homepage. A little reading and I discover Sony have sold 1 million consoles in the US, and tell us the PS3 has reached this figure faster than the PS2 did, thus, will sell better than even the PS2 in the long term.

I'm.. not sure how they apply that logic without noting the PS3 was still outsold by everything else, leading us to ask... will all the others not therefore sell better too? I also doubt the PS2 fell short of a million units by it's first Christmas sales due to anything other than a late release in the season and massive understocking on Sony's behalf.

This doesn't mean the PS3 is not going to win, but it's a joke to claim it's even near the lead just yet. It feels like a desperation cry more than anything else, and I'm pretty sure Sony's target by New Years was meant to be 2 million. In March, Sony open the PS3 to Europe, after which they expect to hit the 6 million mark. Now... if the US reaches 1 million... I'm thinking the EU... on an even later release... having by then had the 360 for a year and a half... will have less sales. And even if it does sell well - we're aiming to sell 115 million in 5 years to claim the same market share as the PS2 did. Is the low sales purely due to understocking? If Sony put 50 million units in stores tomorrow would they all be snapped up? Speaking of all being snapped up, what I don't understand is why I know lots of people who've bought a next gen console, but the sales figures are less than 10% of previous gen sales across the board. Some weird maths going on here. Maybe Europe do by the lions share of the games consoles. *shrugs*

Moving from the US, Japan has had all 3 consoles for a while now too. In the last generation, the X-Box made almost no appearance in the market - Sony and Nintendo shared dominance of the island. This time round, the 360 has put its foot in the door - while only capturing a small market share, it's massively siginificant for Microsoft to even have one, and while I don't think it will massively grow, it should make for an easier PR battle in the next generation - until now, the US developed console has lacked familiarity to the consumers over there.

Any of you guys bought a next gen console?  Think the PS3's a sure bet still?
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Phil