Sony have already won...

[Non Sequor]

HappySqurriel said:

X-Man said:

If the war is between PS3/360, quite frankly, Sony have already won.

Looking back, the PS2 got the bulk of its sales from Europe (Others), not NA or Japan. At the rate the PS3 is selling, it will overtake the 360 in 'Others' by mid-08.

Japan is by far the smallest region but it's certainly not insignificant. Between the PS3 and 360, it pretty much belongs to Sony. The coming of games such as Gran Turismo 5 and Final Fantasy XIII will only further escalate the situation.

That only leaves North America. Microsoft cannot win this war with strong NA sales alone. Unless they can turn this around, they're destined to come in third.

As I see it, 08 is the make or break year for both Microsoft and Sony. And to some extent, Nintendo.

 

If you reply then please give reasonable and logical answers. And for the love of God, no fanboys.

When you actually consider that gamers have limited time and money, and developers have limited resources, these systems are still in competition with the Wii (and the Nintendo DS and PSP to a lesser extent).

Beyond that, the reality is that Worldwide sales numbers really don't matter. The world is not a single market, and each market buys games that suit their tastes; to a certain extent Americans and the "Other" regions buy similar games but there are still a lot of games which are more targeted towards one of the regions over the other.

The PS3 (realistically) doesn't gain much from their lead in Japan because Japaneese centered game development will be focused on the Wii and Nintendo DS. The European Lead will be unimportant because it is negated by the lead Microsoft has in North America and is limited by the ammount of European game development.

 This is an incredibly important point and I was about to bring it up. Winning in Europe doesn't really help much since most developers just view European sales as icing on top of sales in Japan or North America.

 It's actually possible for a console to get second place worldwide but still be weak enough in the two most important markets to lose developer support.

 I don't think it's a sure thing that the PS3 will catch up to the 360 in worldwide sales. There's still a gap of 7m between the two and I don't think the PS3 has ever outsold the 360 by more than a tiny amount. Even if the PS3 starts outselling the 360 by 100k per week, it'll take 70 weeks for it to catch up and before that 70 weeks is up, both Nintendo and Microsoft will definitely have more price cuts, slowing or preventing Sony from catching up.