Thursday, August 21, 2008

Mini Console Post of the Week

The Xbox 360 sold 24,962 units in Japan last week. The PS3 sold 9,673.
Seriously. I'm not high.

The release of Tales of Vesperia caused this relative stampede, and incredibly, the PS3 has outsold the 360 by less than 2,000 units in the last four weeks.

Oh, and 360s are in very short supply in Japan right now. Sold out. And again, let me reassure you that I am, in fact, not high.

I said this before, but Microsoft has doggedly pursued Japan, and while they might be making painfully slow progress, they are making progress.

Many of you sent me a link to a 1UP article about Dave Perry's presentation to the Games Convention Developers Conference in Leipzig-- in particular, this excerpt:
When discussing the current console race, he brought up some interesting statistics that he obtained from research firm DFC Intelligence. According to Perry, Sony has lost more money selling PlayStation 3s than it made selling PlayStation 2s during the entire five years of its peak. So basically, all of the money Sony made on hardware last generation -- it's already spent more to sell the PS3 at a loss so far. Some estimates put that loss at $3 billion.

That's interesting, and certainly not surprising, but it's also somewhat misleading. Comparing the hardware loss for the first 18 months of the console versus the five prime years of the console isn't much of a comparison-- far better to compare the first 18 months of each console's lifespan against each other.

Regardless, I don't think there's any dispute that Sony has lost gigantic truckloads of money selling the PS3 so far. They overdesigned the hardware, they're not going to catch up in this generation, and it was a disastrous strategic move on their part.

Site Meter