The funniest thing is the comments after that article. The ps3 fans were going crazy. One guy said he owned 3 ps3s and wanted to know if people like him were being counted, yeah there is a million people that just decided to buy 3 of the same system, the most expensive one on the market, seriously.

This is really great news for Sony, PS3= $600, GC=$150 and they sell the same. I'm truly stunned you people think this is bad news.

 Its only alarming because of name recognition. If you look at all the variables it makes sense based on Price and competition of this generation. Its not alarming or disgusting like people want to make it sound if we actually consider the variables at work liek logical people.....thus, madness will ensue as logic knows know plce in PS3 bashing threads.

The Gamecube did well in the US compared to how it did in Eu

if you put all three regions together the PS3 would be ahead by about 500k worldwide (yes there is data for GC 'other' on the charts)

@Griffin

This is terribly bad news. You cannot spin it into good news. Not that your particular spin maneuver has not been tried in the past. Less a revelation, and more of a excuse for the system to do poorly. There are parallels with the previous generation, but there are fundamental differences. I could spin shallow numbers to.

The reality is the excuse does nothing to help Sony out. The situation is what the situation is. They are selling a console at a stupendous loss to drive the sales even this high. Even then last month they lost to the 360 the second place runner in the war at this point by 5 to 1 in North America. Sony needs less excuses, and more results if they do not break ahead soon they are likely to lose the war, and very likely to be a third place finisher.

Let me spin something out for you. The PS3 may be under performing the GC at this point in its life, but what of those GC numbers how many years ago did it make those sales? The market has expanded since that time has it not. So if you factor that in the PS3 is probably doing much worse then the GC. Say the market has expanded by a meager ten percent. Effectively if you factor in market inflation the PS3 might be doing markedly worse.

The gamecube was $200 and the PS3 is $400 now.  Look -- two can spin numbers if they want.

The fact is that the PS3 has always been available for approximately $400 in Japan, ever since launch.  Now it's available for that price in Europe and will be available for that price in America as well.

But the price discrepancy doesn't imply better future sales.  Sony cannot cost reduce competitively against the gamecube.  What does that mean?  It means that the PS3 can't compete at $200 vs $200 because it simply costs too much to make.  The PS3 is much more full featured than the gamecube, and doesn't try to compete on merely being a games machine.  Therefore, we can not make price vs price comparisons, but rather sales themselves.

It seems like some Sony fans are assuming that because the cheapest PS3 model was always 2x to 2.5x more expensive than the gamecube then it will eventually drop in price and eventually sell better than the gamecube.  This is not a foregone conclusion because the price drops won't necessarily match those on the gamecube.  Even if they matched the gamecube for percentage dropped, the PS3 would be $300 and $250 6 years into its life (the plat gamecube is $99 right now).

 Your logic is flawed. you admit they are two different beasts and cant use the price to compare them, yet you want to directly compare their sales with each other to determine the constant success or failure of each console directly? How does that make any sense?

As much as Nintendo fans like boasting about how they are now leading the market worldwide, the obvious reality is that most game developers and publishers are really only interested in regional performance. A company like EA, Ubisoft, Activision and THQ are primarily interested in the North American market because that is where the bulk of their sales are made ... A company can not (really) make up for poor sales in North America by having slightly better sales in Japan ...

 It's bad news because:

(a) Third party developers dont care the relative cost of PS3 to Gamecube just the sales of PS3 against those of Wii and 360;

(b) Gamecube was sold at a profit, PS3 is sold at a loss and PS3 would have to sell hell of alot of consoles to be able to reduce manufacturing costs.  Without doing so they are dropping prices all over resulting in increased losses.

It has to be considered a huge failure that even with the Playstation brand name PS3 is tracking below Gamecube (I have a friend who played my Wii and said next time he spoke to me said he misses playing that my Playstation which goes to show the Playstation brand name was so powerful some people equated it with videogames).

@Dodece, of course its bad news, but its fun to spout nonsense. Sony screwed up the first year so much its not even funny. But the PS3 is also up against two great machines the 360/wii.

I would of loved for Sony to win the first year but the high price of the system was a joke on the industry. It was worth it based on what was inside it but no one cared. Plus Sony had no killer apps to save the PS3. It had great games but none of the games that made the PS2 great.

For me and many other sony fans the first year has been pretty much a giant beta test for Sony to get its act together for its second year.