PS3 sales only 6 months behind xbox360

[Viper1]

mrstickball said:

DrDread said:

I was just looking at the weekly hardware sales charts :

http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?weekly=1

... and It was pointed out to me today that the current units sold of PS3s worlwide are about 18.8 million. Xbox360 hit 18.8 million almost exactly six months ago. So I suppose you can say PS3 sales are only 6 months behind the XBox360, however, PS3 came out more then a year after the XBox360 did.

Does this stand to reason that PS3 has closed the gap in the lead XBox had in sales by half since they have been out? Is it also looking like PS3 will overtake the XBox within a year or two at this rate?

PS3 was outselling XBox for a long while until recently, the last few months, which might be attributed to the XBox price drop (The Drive hack probably helped to). I feel XBox will continue to outsell until probably next year when the PS3 will most likely have it's own big price drop, but do you think XBox will drop price again?. Are the prices going to go any lower then $200 for the next gen systems anytime soon? PS2 still sell for over $100

The big issue with saying that 'oh, it's 6 months behind' is the fact that the next 6 months for the X360 saw massive, rapid increases in sales due to the price drop and Christmas.

The better way to gauge it will be to see how long it's going to take the Playstation 3 to hit the X360's current number of 26.8 million consoles. I tend to think that, given typical yearly trends, that it's going to take a bit longer than 6 months to reach the near-27m install base of the X360.

To further expand upon this point, let's take the sales rate of the PS3 just prior to the holidays and apply it until we reach the X360's current install base.   Now this should work in the PS3's favor as the early months of the year are usually the slowest so I'm giving it some solid sales cusion here.

The pace was about 150k per week.  7,674,943 / 150k = 51.16 weeks.  Obviously the PS3 will have higher sales than the 150k average in the latter few weeks given that it would extend again into the holiday season so we're looking at late fall. 

That makes it closer to 10-11 months away from achieving the X360's current install base, not 6 months.