Will PS3 ever take over 360?

[kn]

KillerMan said:

kn said:

Hus said:

kn said:


So... take recent sales histories, take out your fanboy beliefs, project forward a bit and it is going to come down to, in my opinion, U.S. beating PS3 for the forseeable future, Europe split *fairly* close over time, and Japan solidly behind the PS3. How long will it take, then?

Europe flip fairly even, tell me what does the 360 have in 08 to combat GranTurismo5 in Europe ? GTA is multi so in a "even" Europe the tag team of GTA and GT is a monster to beat.

Point to conside r- Even now PS3 is outselling the 360 in Germany, Italy and Spain. Thats a 185million market, half of western that seems to be for whatever reason not very 360 friendly.

Fact is at half the price and with a Euro froendly game like Forza2 out already the 360 should be having no trouble outselling the PS3 in every single European market.

You were doing fine with your first sentence, Hus, but then your fanboy nature got the better of you. You are (again) betting on one game (GT5) to be the deciding factor in this race. This has proven to be a bad assumption on both sides repeatedly. Don't look to a few regions in Europe. Look at Europe as a whole and add up the sales. There will always be spots that play to one side or the other.

Before X360 price drop PS3 outsold X360 every week (Price different 200€). PS3 has huge potential in europe. Sony only needs to drop price.

Yep, outsold until recently by 5K-10K units on average for all "others".  That's hardly worth noting and if you look back at my previous post, I said "split fairly close" in Europe which is where we are at the moment.  5-10K on average per week -- call it 7500 average -- is 30K/month for Europe plus others.  It would be years to catch up in europe based on that number.  I'm sure that the hardware issues with the 360 have had a significant effect on the box and I'm assuming that a redesigned unit will overcome some of that, but that is pure conjecture on my part.

Since noone wants to take the time, I pulled weekly "All World" data through last few months.  Here are the numbers I got from VG Chartz.  Keep in mind I kept the numbers as close to the months I could -- i.e. they may not align with NPD with one week spilling into the next.  I tried to keep all of may, for instance in may and so on.

 

May
Xbox 360	362097
PS3	319409

 

June
Xbox 360	312714
PS3	231628

 

July
Xbox 360	259443
PS3	344629

August
Xbox 360	488486
PS3	478394

 

From this, I get the following total over the last 4 months.

 

Xbox 360	1422740
PS3	1374060

 

And a per month average (worldwide) of:

 

Xbox 360	355685
PS3	343515

Since that still has the 360 in the lead, the obvious answer is never.  I'm not going to do the math -- maybe ioi can give us the tools to download data to a spreadsheet so that we can do more complex analysis, but it is a pain in the ass to pull everything down week by week and build a sheet when all the data is sitting right there.  A true moving average would be nice but a lot of work.  But, given the above, you get the impression that the PS3 has an uphill battle if the idea of "passing" the 360 is the goal.  Even if the numbers above were reversed, 11K/month would take 35 years or more to close the gap.

I'm not bashing the PS3 though I'm sure Hus, Leo, and everyone else will tell me how blind I am, but the numbers are what they are.  Until the PS3 mounts a significant, and lasting, leap in sales above the 360, we can begin to guess the timeframe.  We haven't reached that point, yet, and it doesn't exactly appear likely any time soon.  It certainly isn't going to happen through the end of this year for sure.  To think that the PS3 might catch the 360 next year would mean the PS3 on a worldwide basis will have to start outselling the 360 on a monthly basis by 100s of thousands.  There is currently a 6 million unit gap.  That means 500K units overall PER MONTH OVER the 360 would be required to catch it in a year.  That's just lunacy to belive that is going to happen any time soon.  If it's going to happen -- and that's a big if -- I wouldn't count on seeing it get close until 2009 at the earliest.

But again, I use math, and not fanboy conjecture.  I'm sure that the blind fanboys will tell me that X game will make the difference -- i.e. GT will turn the tide, or a pricecut will turn the tide, or a blue-ray victory will do it, or so many other baseless arguments.  The reality is in the sales numbers, folks.  Plain and simple.  For every action there is a reaction.  If sony cuts their price, so will Microsoft.  For every uber game the PS3 releases, there is a title on the 360 that does just as well.  Don't think MS will stand by and watch Sony try every strategy under the sun to blow past MS without microsoft pulling out all stops to counter.