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HappySqurriel on 13 August 2008
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BKK2 said:
It should be noted that he is talking about active installed base, this is not the same as actual sales. This is why he has PS2 active installed base at only 90 million.

The EIF chairman presented figures he arrived at by triangulating Screen Digest and IDG data. He also took into account factors such as the growth of hi-def and the grey gamer market, the emergence of new game engines and increasing ubiquity of wi-fi access. He said the active installed base for hardware is set to rise from 316 million to 500 million over the next three years, with "two big mega-powers" leading the charge.

According to Deering sales of the DS and any future iterations of the hardware will reach 150 million by 2011, while the figure for Wii will be 80 million. He predicted the installed base for PS3 will be 70 million, and said for PS2 it will be 90 million and PSP will be 70 million. In other words, Sony and Nintendo will each have sold 230 million machines.


The Screen Digest computer model uses estimates of annual sales for each hardware format to calculate `active installed base' data. `Active installed base' refers to the number of machines for which owners are still purchasing software. However, this is not simply equivalent to cumulated sales, since it is well known that software purchasing is heavily biased towards new hardware owners. There is a strong novelty factor and the longer the hardware is possessed, the less likely is the owner to continue buying new software

But the active install base of the PS2 is already considerably lower than 90 Million ...

If you look at World Weekly software sales the PS2 is already noticeably lower than the other consoles, and although this total will be very incomplete I doubt that the titles that do not sell enough to get listed really push the software sales of the PS2 to be in the range of the Nintendo DS. Certainly, the "active" PS2 userbase is still probably larger than the other consoles but it is shrinking (very) rapidly and those that remain as PS2 owners are the most passive console owners on the market.