Interesting. I haven't looked at any sales figures recently but here in the UK local support for the PS3 seems to be on the rise, I don't know anybody into gaming without one and many friends and family are planning to pick one up for christmas. Of course my tiny life and circle of acquaintances don't count for much but I'm getting a good feeling about the PS3.
14 Come on. Subaru withdrew from the World Rally Championship. What's the importance of a Sony Entertainment division... =P
Do you really believe SCE is going down? I'd be really pissed now that I have my PS3 :banghead: But true this generation belongs to Big N and M$ so far... and it's hard to justify the price of a PS3 against a 360 now that you have cheap bluray player on the market. They took a big bet so you might be right, I'd say leave them another 6 months, let's hope they won't make another stupid move like Home which I think is a complete waste of time and money. Sabre
I don't have one, and I have the majority of consoles that were released in the UK and several that weren't. The system is awful. It's overpriced, it's had lots of problems, it had a MAJOR redesign which took out the promised backwards compatability, the controller feels HORRIBLE and the motion control feature was a last minute effort to compete with the Wii's control method. I know the 360 had some bad press with the red ring problem, but at least Microsoft eventually sorted that with a 3 year warranty. You'd get no such thing from Sony. My 360 is 2 years old now and still going strong. The console is, in my mind, a LOT better than the PS3. It has MANY decent games (not just a handful of decent exclusive games and a lot of rehashes of old 360 games), PROPER backwards compatability that is STILL a feature of modern models, a decent controller (OK let's not mention the D-pad lol) and a nice gamer score system that is easier to view as an overview than the PS3 one. I don't care about blu-ray - it is a console, not a video source. If I want to watch films, I'll get a stand-alone player and NOT wear out my console's drive. ALL my friends have a 360, only some have a PS3. PLENTY of my friends had a PS3 and got rid of it. As for sales, we were stuck with our initial batch of 1st gen PS3s for a LOONG time. We had to bundle them and drop the price for them to sell. Oh, by long time, I mean we still had them when they were discontinued and hard to find! Conversely, 360s have always sold well and we never had a second hand one remain in stock for longer than a week... and that would be a rarity. They usually sold within 2 days.... sometimes we provisionally sold them before they had been taken in, been tested and paid for! Whilst you can't really call the Wii a competitor per se, it actually is! It's a great console that's brought fun, original gaming back with its novel control methods. The Wii is still in such demand that there will be supply problems well into next year. Incidentally, sales figures. Q1 2007 (taken from MCV but unsure what region): Wii 259,000 360 199,000 PS3 130,000 May 2007 USA: Wii 338,000 360 155,000 PS3 82,000 Why am I giving you 2007's data, you ask? Well, Sony has revealed that the year-to-date sales of the PS3 are up 60% on 2007's numbers. November's sales alone (378,071 units) were a 93% improvement over October's. So let's look at March 2008, almost a year on: Wii 720,000 360 262,000 PS3 257,000 The year's sales are: over 2.8 million PS3 consoles 3,552,456 PS3 games So, how many 360s were sold in November? More than 378,000? Errm, yes. 836,000 360s sold in the US. And the Wii? Over 2 million units! The Wii has sold 15.4 million units in the US alone. Incidentally, if you want to get up-to-date statistics, you need to subscribe to www.npd.com for the US and www.chart-track.co.uk for the UK.
if it didn't have Bluray i'd agree with you. but Bluray is getting more and more popular all the time. this holiday season is Blu.
I dont think it will die, Sony has too big of a name. And already has Its name set in stone as being a great blu ray Player, And a moderate Game system.
Too bad we don't have a bottle of that awful sony playstation wine for the prize. Put it this way: If car mfgs are going under, and the "good" ones (japanese) are down 30% and hurting what does that say? If you were a developer and had to spend $15,000,00 on a ps3 title and sell less, or spend $10,000,000 on a 360 title and sell more, what would you pick? The problem with ps3 is there's no advantage to it. Carnival games for Wii was made for something like $200,000 and it has sold over 2.6 MILLION copies making the developers some $18,000,000 on their $7 profit per game. Haze cost something like $15,000,000 and sold only 500K copies. They only make $7.00 a copy, so they lost some 11 million on the game. -$11,000,000 $15,000,000 makes you ten budget titles for wii.
Note: THE LEADER in video recording 1978. By 1980, VHS had 80% of the US market and nearly as much in the UK. Sony switched to VHS production in 1988 in the West, and the last Japanese machine was made in 2002. Most major manufacturers stopped producing VHS machines in 2008, if not before, although there are still some being produced. And don't forget, technically Betamax was the superior format. VHS won basically due to numbers - they got more films on their format. Sony may have won the format war for HD discs, but they are far from winning the console war. Removing backwards compatability took away thousands of games from the console's library, giving it only a handful of exclusive titles and not all of them were great. However, the Wii has backwards compatability with Gamecube PLUS the download facility for old games, the catalogue for which is growing rapidly. Xbox 360 also has a large amount of Xbox games which work, more being added to the list occasionally, and the downloaded arcade games.
Sony needs a major price drop or the PS3 is dead. For a development company Wii is the best choice. It has the largest ROI or return on investment and is gaining ground. Second is the PS2, I places it second because it is an older console, third is the 360. Unless more PS3 consoles sale the ROI is not high enough to warrent companies making games for it. In the end that can kill the console. As for the argumetn of a blue ray player. I can get a basic blue ray player at wall mart for $150 add an BASIC xbox 360, PS2 or WII and based on which console you are either at or below a prioce of a PS3 price but have more game choices.
Forget about it - although i never liked PlayStation consoles i doubt that it's a sinking ship. There are too many people just buying a PS3 because it's PlayStation. I'm sure Sony will stay Number 3 this generation but they will sell enough consoles to keep it alive for at least 3 more years. But i think developing and releasing PS4 will be a problem for Sony. I doubt that they will be able to release another home console - maybe they shrink the Cell processor to mobile size and use it for PSP2. That would be a fine revenge for the PSOne and PS2 domination over Sega Saturn and Dreamcast. But let's hope Nintendo's casual gaming virus will not doom videogames as we know it! Big profit with bad games is no good combination.
The problem is sony can't afford to drop the price. They still lose $250 each ps3. Another cut to be in line with the 360 would mean $350 loss. By being successful they would go bankrupt. They need to sell TWENTY ONE game per system at this point to break even. With a $100 price cut that means they need to sell appx THIRTY GAMES to break even on each ps3. They never gonna do it. If they had DVD instead of blue ray, they could cut $180 off the ps3 yesterday.
Uh, what? The 360 doesn't have any of the original Xbox hardware in there, it's purely emulation, and it's nothing close to 100%. It's not "proper" backwards compatibility at all. Total hardware sales so far: PS3 ~17 million 360 ~22 million Wii ~34.5 million PS3 is trailing, but the clear winner is the Wii. Comparatively the 360 and the PS3 are pretty much on equal standing. I only own the 360, and I'm not slating it at all, but to say the PS3 is dead in the water is ridiculous.
The PS3 is dropping in America but rising in Japan and Europe, those markets can carry it for a long time. It's a good machine, the exclusive games are good, it's only the fact that so many people also have 360's and a lot of games are cross platform that people spout the "there's no games on it" line. Similar with the PSP, sales are nowhere near the DS' but enough for it to carry on with a strong market.
OK, there are some glitches, but I meant the idea of backwards compatability, not the end result. Sony promised backwards compatability that was meant to be hardware driven, then released it as a software emulation in Europe, much to our annoyance. They had problems with it, then dropped the idea altogether. Microsoft, on the other hand, kept going and sometimes patched the glitches. I would not be happy to be sold a console with the promise that the amount of old titles that would be compatible would increase, only to find the whole idea dropped not long after! That said, Nintendo seem to have made the same mistake with the new DS! I don't think the PS3 is dead and buried quite yet, I'd say it has a good couple of years left. HOWEVER, it is by no means as popular as the other consoles. Yes, it is picking up now, but I don't think it will ever surpass the 360.
Yeah, 360 emulation is pretty lame and they pretty much dropped it, but it's still better then not playing them at all. The games that do work sometimes work better too. Some run like ass. A big thing keeping me from buying a PS3 is no BC. I have no problems dumping my PS2 to save space. Looks like Wii is the only one with proper BC.
Most PS3s still come with the PS2's GPU hardware in it and subsequently have PS2 compatibility on a level similar to the 360. As I understand it, the only model that doesn't have backwards compatibility of PS2 titles is the 40GB model, comparable to the 360 Arcade, which also doesn't have BC. Personally I don't think any of these situations are satisfactory - hardware BC is superior, and at least early PS3s had that. They're both fairly comparable in terms of sales, so I don't know what you mean by "popularity". If nothing else, I find the idea that Sony would cancel their leading Blu-Ray player kind of silly. Every Blu-Ray player out there increases Blu-Ray disc sales.
Quite. The Wii has TRUE support, and is superb. Microsoft haven't released an update in a year, which is disappointing, but there are still almost 500 games that are compatible, basically half of the Xbox library. The REALLY impressive thing is that an unreleased game is on the list!!!
