It’ll be interesting to see what long-term impact MGS4 has (I doubt much) but it’s even more evidence that MS continues to fiddle while their 2nd place in NA only empire burns. I doubt a $299 clearance sale on the 20GB models are going to change that, nor will Gears of War 2.
They might get some Nintendo loyalists with Banjo, since that was quite big on the N64 - but at the same time Sony has Little Big Planet, a game that I hope will do really well.
I agree that GoW (nor Resistance 2) will change much, since both genres are allready over represented and fans of console FPS games allready jumped in some time ago.
Well it’s not like the MS numbers are bad. The Nintendo numbers continue to defy reason, and the PS3 saw its first game based hardware jump with the release of MGS4, but as we saw with the release of Halo3 that hardware bump will most likely be very short lived. Next month should see Sony and MS neck and neck again with the Wii continuing to sell like crazy for no good reason.
This is really the first significant jump in hardware sales I’ve seen from a single exclusive. This makes the FFXIII announcement from MS more significant.
Still, I don’t really expect the jump the PS3 got to continue. There’s nothing to follow Metal Gear until the fall and the summer months are typically slow for everyone.
Halo3 saw a bigger jump for 360, but that quickly dissipated the next month. Or did you mean for PS3? And yeah, the FF13 announcement is huge as we’ve seen the “but it’s a Sony franchise so they’ll see a bigger bump” line of thinking has turned out to not be the case with multiplatform titles.
US LTD
Wii - 10.9 million
360 - 10.5 million
PS3 - 4.9 million
The Wii sales for this time of year are unprecedented, I’ll need to dig up P2 sales for this point in it’s life at some point and compare, but I’m pretty sure Wii is outpacing the PS2 by a fair bit. If MS didn’t have that console lead do you think they could have pulled off the FF13 coup?
PS2 sales are VERY profitable. They recoup part of the PS3 loss. A PS2 in Europe still sells for like 160 $, and it’s still pushed together with casual games like Buzz & Singstar a lot.
Considering that the PS2 is sold at a profit while the PS3’s profit margin is razor thin, at best, it’s to their best interest to keep PS2 healthy. Also, the people who are buying PS2s won’t automatically jump to PS3, they would most likely jump to the Wii (if they can find one).
Also it gells with their “stick with us we’ll continue to support our platform no matter how outdated” message.
Microsoft does seem to be sitting on their lead with a bit too much comfort. They likely have second place in the North American market locked up for this cycle, but I could see the PS3 catching them in world-wide numbers eventually if they remain complacent. Microsoft really needs to figure out a way to bundle a blu-ray player with the 360 by the holiday season. There will be a lot of people getting HDTVs for the first time and picking up a blu-ray player seems like a natural. Why leave Sony with a big edge there?