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slowmo on 10 September 2010
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arcelonious said:
slowmo said:
arcelonious said:

In the end, does it really matter whether or not the PS3 surpasses the 360 in overall console sales?  If you look at recent software sales, there is an incredibly smaller gap between the PS3 and 360 version of games.

Take Mafia II for example.  The 360 version of Mafia II sold 114,377 this week, while the PS3 version sold 113,252.  That's barely over a 1,000 units difference.

Clearly the 360's 5 million plus lead should be generating a considerable amount more software sales than the PS3, but recent trends seem to suggest that the PS3 has dramatically decreased the gap in terms of software sales (which may suggest that the user bases are closer in size than the sales suggest).

Or one of those consoles has a piracy issue and the other doesn't yet...

Yes piracy is an issue, but it's impact on the 360 has been consistent (i.e., it's plagued the 360 early on).  Yet, despite the piracy problems, the 360 has generally generated far more software sales than the PS3 in previous years.  That difference has recently decreased dramatically.


It's not a point I can be proved either right or wrong on so I cannot really say much to change anyones viewpoint.  The only thing that has changed since the 360 was first cracked for piracy until now is that originally it took a lot of research and was quite daunting to hack a 360 to play copies.  Thanks to a certain application I will not mention the name of here it's not a difficult thing to understand anymore so there is more people offering the service. 

I would say the number of consoles banned over the years though does support your suggestion of the userbases being closer than the sales figures suggest.  I'd estimate there must be somewhere between 1-2 million consoles that are banned now and when tied with the 360's higher failure rate intially there is certainly not 5 million more consoles out there.  Perhaps it's a bit of both, shame we don't have accurate figures of failure rates and console bans for the respective consoles to extrapolate the data.