Preacher37 said:
People, people. I can understand a fanboy or two wanting a console to succeed, or even investors to be behind their product so that they will increase their profits through mass market appeal, or even if you were saying that the PS3 is the most fun of any system ever. I could understand any of those things, but are we seriously wasting our time to have a discussion of the PS3 sales over its life by "guestimating" life-cycle and averaging sales after only one year?????????
OK, a couple facts
- The PS3 has been out only 21 months and has sold 14.6 units so far
- Previous to the Playstation Nintendo was the uncontested console leader, even beating a system with a grand head start and some fancy hedgehog
- The PS2 is only eight years old and is already starting to wane in appeal and sales as the current-gen heats up and the DS and PSP are kicking butt
- This site tracks hardware information about current and past console sales, which means we can speak learnedly about numbers analysis
- Because something has happened in the past DOES NOT mean it will ever happen again, especially sales numbers, let alone in the near future(see: success of current Nintendo console surpassing "success" of previous Nintendo console
If we average PS3 sales over the 21 months it has been out then they have sold 1.44(rounded up) a month, and approximately 8.34 million a year. Obviously there were some months that it did not sell this, and we should probably use that data at some point, but at any rate if we assume the ten year life-span that the PS3 would sell 83.43 million units in it's life time.
I say all this to point out the futility of using numbers this way and the utter ridiculousness of "gestimating" future sales based on previous generations. There is way too much variability in the console industry to rely on stability of sales and numbers, because lest we forget in Oct 2006 everyone was saying that the Wii was a fad and would not do any better than Gamecube and that, as you put here, the PS3 would sell 120 million. And yes, for the record I do realize the irony in writing a long statement to mention how much time we are wasting, but there you have it.
If you are interested in decrying Nintendo and supporting Sony with such vigor I applaud your efforts on another site, perhaps even the Sony Defense Force Website. But please, if you are going to post at a site that does number tracking, at least get your facts straight. And make sure that you recognize trends AFTER they happen and not pass opinion as factual data when a) the data to support your hypothesis isn't present(PS3 hasn't hit 15 mil yet, nor has the PS3 been out two years) or b) current industry trends suggest that Wii could pass PS2 in lifetime sales given projections over time and Wii has been doubling sales since they came out.
And I hope you are right btw, because if Sony sells 95 mil, and Wii outsells by double as is the trend, then over 300 million in console sales is possible, and that has to be good for the industry ;)
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