Playstation business heading South

[WereKitten]

@numonex
Aside from stroking fans' ego, what difference does it make that the gap is 8 million and growing? Or what difference would it make if it was 0, or reversed?
In this phase Sony is still trying to become profitable on the hardware, as such its greatest interest with the sales for the time being is to keep developers and customers interested in its platform.

Nowadays the gap might be 8M, but the absolute numbers are 30 to 21.5, not 9 to 1. As such a developer that has to decide if spending that 30% more to go multiplatform sees a ratio of 10:7 consoles in X360:PS3. Close enough to parity that both platform are considered with equal weight by third parties, moneyhatting allowing. Same thing would happen if the roles were reversed.

Actually, the exception is the nested japanese submarket, where the ratio is 3:1 in favor of the PS3 and that might mean a number of exclusive titles of specific genres (JRPGs, SRPGs) coming from those smaller software houses that aren't that interested into expanding to the west.
In that sense, at Sony they are probably right now much more interested in how to bring down the hardware costs and how to promote their brand than in the 8M gap. Their mission of putting the PS3 on the map again in the eyes of developers is accomplished yet.

As for the libraries, both consoles have good libraries, but it takes some fervid imagination to dismiss Sony's first party titles as a "handful" when compared to the 360. Let's wait to see what is announced at GDC and E3, but for the time being I don't really see a lineup of titles for the 360 eclipsing the PS3 one.