Old Sony console outsold PS3 in US last month

Sony's PlayStation 3 proved less popular than its predecessor in the US last month. According to market watcher NPD, the PS3 fell way behind the market leaders: Nintendo's DS Lite and Wii. NPD's numbers for November retail sales put the PS3 down at 466,000 units, around 30,000 fewer than the 496,000 PS2s that crossed counters …

[steve]

Oh Great.......

Another console story, which means another thread for the fanbois to argue over. Want to take bets that it takes less than 5 posts before someone declares either "Xbox wins console wars" or "PS3 is still better than xbox"?

To be honest, i hope the ps3 continues to do badly. That way, the price will drop and i'll buy one :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Way back when

On a tangent, does Sony still sell the original Playstation? I understand that the PS2 and PS3 can emulate the venerable olde beast, but it would be amusing to see the PS1 ticking away in discount bins at $19.99, just as the Atari 2600 kept selling into the 1990s. There must be *some* poor people in the US who can't afford to spend $400 on a games console, hard as it must be to imagine.

[Anonymous Coward]

only some joy?

At shipping 962 units over half of which on a console they're now making clear profit on? Add in games, and the long long playstation tail means they're probably feeling very happy about it.

[hans]

PS3 I have one for crimbo

I bought a PS3 for £298 and have tested a few game demos, they are almost like PC games only no mouse/keyboard is frustrating on FPS Titles.

The platforms are good, but again the whole aim shoot thing with the PS3 controller is badly flawed.

I like MotorStorm as its a good game, heavenly sword, well its another jump around and slash, conan (see heavenly sword), Need for Speed Series (All the same). PES (Slow and unresponsive).

ratchet and Clank is an unbelieveably detailed game, and is jaw droppingly well scripted, worth playing.

Therefore what the PS3 needs are some decent games and a bit cheaper too, and at close to £40 to £50 a game nobody is going to 'test the water'.

£30 should be the price point the same as a PC game.

S

[Anonymous Coward]

Taxi for PS3!

Please give our regards to the Sega Dreamcast when you see it. Thanks.

[Dave]

RE: PS3 I have one for crimbo

About the prices of games the same could be said about...thats right you guessed it....blu-ray discs!! A DVD movie is about £15 and a blu-ray is £25, so approx £10 more expensive....funny that?

[Anonymous Coward]

So 962,000 Sony consoles in November?

So basically they sold 962k consoles? For all the griping that's not bad. It's not like people will buy a PS2+PS3 or a PS2+XBox360 so those PS2 are displacing PS3 and XBox360 sales (doubt it replaces Wii because of the controller), Sony can't complain about those numbers. It's *profit* and *unit sales* that are the two biggies, profit because that's the whole purpose, and *unit sales* because that's where your after sales profits are. I assume they're profitable on those PS2s and PS3s and the unit sales look good. A $50 PS2 game vs a $50 PS3 game, ... who cares it's $50.

Sure they'd like all of their console sales to be PS3s since it's a little more money, but still those numbers are pretty impressive.

"Microsoft sold 770,000 Xbox 360s, NPD said, well behind the 981,000 Wiis acquired in the US last month."

Close but no cigar, Wii still beat them both!

[Anonymous Coward]

770,000 360s?

How many of those 360s were replacements for broken consoles?

I don't actually know a single 360 gamer who only owns/has owned 1 360.

Not hating, just curious.

[Iain]

Why, Hans?

If you don't think there are any games worth getting on the PS3, why buy the hardware, Hans? Are you expecting a major turnaround in the near future (i.e. before the next price cut that could have saved you money) or just as a BluRay player?

[Anthony Shortland]

RE: In summary (without the Tony Smith hate spin)

There is absolutely nothing to say that every PS2 owner will buy a PS3 - if that was the case then Atari would probably still be console kings!

This is more proof that gameplay and/or price is far more important than the looks of the graphics to all but the most hardcode geeks?

[Anonymous Coward]

DS & IQ ?

i cant work out DS owners are

a) Mental Giants!

b) Mental Cripples?

As the leading platform for brain improvements then their owners must be mental cripples needing to exercise there feebles minds.....

or, Mental Giants striding high, as its only the intelligent who realise how the more you learn the less you know, where as the proles are content in their ingnorance as the "proverbial pig"

[steve]

See?

Hurrah, my chance to say i told you so. All 5 posts are fanboy ish. (well, except ashley)

The PS3 will be a fantastic piece of kit when the games are there to support it. The 360 is a fanastic bit of kit with games to support it.

@mark: No, the ps2 is no longer going to be bought by hardcore gamers. Then again, neither is the PS3.

@AC: Yes, they are probably happy the ps2 is selling well still, but i will put good money on the fact that they aren't happy it is outselling their current model.

@Ashley: You will be lucky to find a psx in a store, but can probably find a cheap, tacky, badly built psone for about the same price as a decent meal.

@hans: A lot of the games for the ps3 are pretty poor quality. Try "Fall Of Man", and makes sure you have your chin nicely strapped up or a pillow in your lap when you play it.

@AC2: Jumping the gun a bit, me thinks. The dreamcast was never, ever going to do well. The PS3 has good potential.

So there we have it, hopefully i've upset everyone. Mines the coat with the fluffy hood.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ steve

Wow, you were right! Exactly 5 posts.

Amazing article though. I bet Sony are really pissed off that the PS2 is selling loads.

Can't we have a new beancounter pron section for people that find these kinds of stories interesting?

[Alex]

Dreamcast

Thought the ol' boys at Sega were re-inventing it to re-release? Nice one! One, round trip in a taxi then :oD

Still very intrigued to see the PS2 doing very well. Such a massively influential machine, it just keeps going. Like the idea about being able to find a PS1 (Ash), going to set a task for my team to try to find one in a bargain bin (brand new only) to win a prize!

Kudos to Nintendo for the DS and Wii - a solid market share.

Hans : a console is for pick up and play. if you can't play FPS on a console, then you've been playing CS for too long :o) Practice makes perfect mate.

[hans]

@Iain, Dave

I got a PS3 for £298, I previously posted here that when they hit £298 I would buy one, it was my price point. I did , and i was lacking in any real christmas need.

I have tested some games and indeed Resistance Fall of Man, is impressive, its one of the few.

I have no idea why blu ray is £10 more as its all upscaling technology on the blu ray player anyway?

As for price points, and games etc...

Now is a good time to point out that music/video etc has lost value, and we dont value it any more, wanna see my MP3 collection?

So why not have a set of replaceable disc drives for PS3, download all games at a fraction of the price and be done with it.

Im off on a tangent here.....

Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

yadda yadda yaddda

How many Xboxs and Nintendo Gamecubes were sold last month?

Fact is the whole "console wars" thing is a crock for reporters to milk.

Every ps2 sold is profit, ps3's are still paying off the production lines. It's more expensive and has fewer games then the other consoles. It's been out the shortest time. The games that are out are pretty weak. It has Final Fantasy and Grand Tourismo as captive titles. In the long term it will have a vast number of games to exploit the machines it has shifted. In 3 years they'll release a PlayStationThree that's half the size. Also they're still making large numbers of PS2 games, and in Japan at least they'll be pouring games out for the next 2 or 3 years (if the DC is anything to go buy they'll keep making visual novels and ero games for several years after they stop producing the physical console.)

The 360 is a powerhouse that has a good number of games, has been out longer and is cheaper then the PS3, it also has better support for online gaming. It has Halo and DOA as its main captive titles but Halo 3 is the last Halo game (or is there one more??). Like the ps3 it'll have a vast number of games to exploit its user base. They may create a second smaller model like Sony will.

The wii has no online gaming really (at the moment... lol), is dirt cheap and good fun to play with your real live mates or your family. It doesn't have many games and it probably never will.

Alot of people will own all three consoles in the long run. Most people who'd buy an XBox for DOA and Halo would probably get the PS3 for Gran Tourismo. People who buy a ps3 for Final Fantasy probably wouldn't get a 360.

We can wager in the long run the ps3 will have the better RPG's and the 360 will have the better FPS.

Also this is just the States, what are the numbers like if you include Japan?

As an aside I don't own any of them, probably wont until the psThree, I'm tight and no interesting games have come out yet. Except two that are Japanese lol. One on the 360 and one on the PS3.

[Phil]

re: 770,000 360's by AC

I hate keep reading crap like that. They've fixed the problem many months ago. Now the failure rate is no different from any other console/electronic bit of kit.

I've had a 360 since March last year, my kids are on it constantly, still working fine. My daughters ex, used to put his in his rucksack each weekend and bring it round here, it got battered, kicked and all sorts, it STILL works. Most of my 14year old sons friends have 360's, all of them are on their first console.

Personally I think a big problem for the PS3 has nothing to do with which console is better. A couple of my sons friends have PS3's but all their friends are playing Gears of war and Halo 3 etc over Xboxlive on the 360. Guess what, both friends with the PS3 are now getting 360's for Christmas.

I wanted to get a PS3, so tried to use my kids (14 and 16year old) as an excuse. Neither can think of anything they want as their main present so I suggested a PS3. neither was interested. "What's the point, all my friends are playing the 360" said my son.

[Alex]

@ hans Re: Downloadable games

Already done and online mate. Get the PS3 online and you can download (albeit less hardcore games) for about 4 quid a pop. Some fun ones on there that can occupy the mind for a while. Also, if you don't want to spend 40 notes no Warhawk, you can download it for 20 notes.

As for BR being a tenner more? DVDs for 5 quid and BR for 15 quid; yeah, but that's the price we paid for DVDs less than a year ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

@mark (and Phil)

"Lets reword it.

'I bet Sony are happy to be making lot of money selling PS2's at a profit, for near on 7 years'."

That's true, but if Sony were happy to only make money out of selling PS2's at a profit then they would never have released the PS3. They did, and they are not going to be happy with its sales no matter what their old product line is doing.

"Alot of people will own all three consoles in the long run."

No they won't. Very few people will ever own more than one of PS3/Wii/360 and I doubt that more than 1 percent will ever own all three. Apart from anything else, there is a huge number of people buying the Wii BECAUSE they don't want/aren't interested in what other consoles are offering.

Have a penguin.

[Highlander]

Hans - Regarding FPS games, BluRay and upscaling

Hans,

1) FPS games like, oh, I don't know, say Call of Duty,or Resistance on consoles are targeted primarily at console game players who are familiar with the controller layout and feel. That said Unreal Tournament, possibly the ultimate FPS game - certainly a heck of a lot prettier than Halo (IMHO) - supports keyboard and mouse play on the PS3. Epic states that the game pace is very slightly slowed on the PS3 to make sure that controller players are not at a disadvantage speed wise when compared to keyboard mouse, but otherwise the PS3 game is identical in look and feel to the PC game. Graphics are smoother too, unless you have a decent gaming rig. So although most FPS games have not yet taken to K&M support, it's coming.

2) BluRay involves no upscaling of the picture. It's recorded on the disc at 1080p and the picture is then downsampled to whatever your TV can handle. If you have a 1080p set, you get the full 1080p goodness. BluRay and HD-DVD discs are more expensive at this point because they are still new. DVDs at this point in their life cycle were similarly higher in price and once mass adoption happened the prices of new discs settled lower. Both Xbox and PS3 games were pitched at a higher price from the beginning. Most game makers seemed to take advantage of the switch to the new generation of console to bump their game prices.

3) Upscaling is nothing to do with BluRay. A BluRay player may upscale DVDs, but when playing a BluRay disc, there is no upscaling occuring. PS3 upscales DVDs very nicely, and performs something close to miracles with PS2 games. Soul Calibur 3 for PS2 played on my 60GB launch model(US) looks and plays amazing. Not as good as real 'next gen' PS3 games, but a big step up from the PS2 game on a standard def TV.

Lastly, downloading content is not yet viable. You cannot download HD content - it's too big. A typical movie in full BluRay HD can run anything from 25-50GB depending on the codec used and the quality of the transfer. You can download MP3s because they compress the original audio data by a ratio of about 10:1 resulting in pretty small files, but also a distinct quality loss. You can squish HD movies into 4GB files to download them in less than a day, but in doing so you also drop the quality of the picture and sound below that of original DVDs. Pointless really. People really need to get off the download bandwagon until the infrastructure supports it. Gigabit Internet and petabyte discs for home PCs. Get those two techs working, and I'll believe in downloading HD content. I might even believe that pigs can fly.

[Nigel]

not feeling hated at all :)

<QUOTE>How many of those 360s were replacements for broken consoles?

I don't actually know a single 360 gamer who only owns/has owned 1 360.

Not hating, just curious.</QUOTE>

... well, for one.... me. :)

Own a MK1 360 Premium, never had the ring of death, never had a PSU blow up in my face, and the thing pretty much gets hammered by a bunch of mates regularly.

However, lodger has just bought a 60Gb PS3 (wouldnt let him buy the 40Gb sh1te one - no point crippling a console!).

£379 with Smackdown, Fall of man and RR7 - but NO HD lead WTF??? I know its a loss leader but throw in a £5 HDMI cable for pete's sake!

[Jason]

Broken Consoles

"How many of those 360s were replacements for broken consoles?

I don't actually know a single 360 gamer who only owns/has owned 1 360.

Not hating, just curious."

The only reason I've owned 2 is that the first was stolen. Both the original and the Elite I now own ran/run like champs.

I, however, did not replace the PS3 that was stolen.

[PIB]

Title

"Hurrah, my chance to say i told you so. All 5 posts are fanboy ish. (well, except ashley)"

... and then you go on to sound fanboyish with your console comments.

It seems that the only way not to appear as a fanboy is to withhold all 'verses' comments and crime of crimes, to express a preference.

Just as sure as there was Amiga verses Atari, Apple verses PC etc. the petulant school boy in a lot of posters, will emerge again and again.

It's the adult 'cop-out' manoeuvre.

[tux08]

r.e. Broken Consoles

Well I don't know what other users have found in relation to console reliability, but I work in retail and have yet to have a PS3 returned, whereas we currently have 4 dead Xbox 360s waiting for collection.

[dave thomson]

Here in Tokyo....

..we have a PCone, and two PS2's (old model and new model). Planning to buy another PS2 to replace the PSone as well.

Thought about buying a PS3 - but only have 1 game we want to play on it so far.

Also the worry is that with the big screen, the 2 PC's, the DVD player, the cable box and the heated carpet that we will trip the circuit breaker if we add the PS3 as well. It's actually a real worry and too hard to change the circuits so will hang back on the PS3 until it becomes more pressing.

[Andrew Tyler]

Okay, Okay..

Look, you guys sort this out. In a year or two go ahead and let me know who won. I'll buy whichever one that is. Thanks.

[steve]

@PIB

Wow, hey now. Fanboyish? I support all three consoles, so which one am i a "fanboy" of, exactly? I pointed out that the 360 has great games. I also pointed out that the ps3 is an astonishing bit of kit, is lacking games at the moment but one of it's games is an absolute stand out (fall of man). I should have added "at the moment" to my "no hardcore gamer will buy a ps3" comment. When it has more decent games, i'm sure gamers will flood to it.

A fanboy is someone who expresses an over-the-top love for one console (and generally, only one console) with no real reason other than "mine is best, yours sucks".

So get back in your box, petulant school boy.

[Andy Worth]

I see your lips moving...

....and all I hear is "Blah Blah Blah". Seriously I see all the 360 vs PS3 vs Wii arguments and it makes me laugh. I've played all three consoles and all three have their own benefits, and drawbacks.

The 360, first of all, while they fixed the overheating problem in the later generation, most people still own the original ones, and are still experiencing the issue. It sounds like a jet engine (even the new model - which is a HUGE oversight from MS) and does not come with a built in HDDVD drive - meaning you have to have an extra bit of kit dangling off it to play them, and is missing wireless networking, unless you spunk another £50 on the kit. On the plus points it has an excellent, wide selection of games (some of which are excellent), is "middle of the road" in pricing and very good graphically.

The PS3 has, at the moment, still some issues with the variety of decent games available (although it IS improving at the moment). It is also still (at this time) missing Blu-Ray 1.1 support, although that has been promised this month, and is the most expensive of the three. I also wouldn't buy the crippled 40GB version. On the plus side it has some refinements that the 360 doesn't - such as just whispering in comparison, built in wireless networking and Blu-Ray player, and the decent games are beginning to come. It also, in theory, has more potential graphically than the 360, although not many developers have managed to take advantage of this yet.

The Wii has, by todays standards, poor graphics, no HD player, and I would say very limited scope for improvement. The range of games for it, in MY opinion is pretty poor, as I could never stand most Nintendo games. However, the console was never aimed at the hardcore gamer - it is more of a family console, and is the cheapest of the three, being affordable for more people. Really the Wii is aimed at a different market to the other two.

So the arguments of "which is better" are pointless as the result depends entirely on what you want out of your console. I'm sure Sony won't be too upset by still selling half a million PS2's a month though, considering they make a tasty profit on each one. I seem to remember it took quite a long time for the PS2 to REALLY take off when it came out, as no-one could write games properly for it at first. Oh, the same with the original Xbox as well - which survived mostly due to Halo in its early days.

[Scott Mckenzie]

The Games

When the PS3 gets a vast selection of great games it'll start to sell... it's no doubt the technologically superior console, but it's woefully lacking in games at the moment, and i think we can all agree that's what sells a console.

I'm tempted to get a 40Gb one as a Blu Ray player as it's pretty much the cheapest way to do so and i then have the benefit of being able to buy a couple of games when some newer/better ones come out

As it stands i'm a perfectly happy "one Xbox 360" owner, one that was purchased on the day of the UK release too.....

[Alex]

@ Andy

*Applauds* Yup, agree. :) Only would add that there are quite a few decent games for the Wii, but it is targeted differently.

Still waiting for Paris and the vat of honey..