| raygun said: Boring? I think it is relevant, if you had a 100 mile car race and let one of the cars have a 20 mile head start, and then say that car is winning the race. They are probably about even, but who cares, they have both won really, they are both selling well. |
Although this analogy seem strong on surface, it is flawed.
In a race, there is the rule that both cars must start at the same time.
In terms of consoles, no such rule exists. All that matters here is which strategy sells the most consoles (really we should be talking about profit, but sales tends to mean influence and non-business people tend to hold that in higher regard, so I'm going to ignore profit).
As such, the argument that it is unfair to judge current sales, and not instead sales in a given time period from the point of the latest console launch, falls apart.
As much as I like Sony I have to place most of the blame on them. The Xbox 360 never really took off until the other two consoles launched, so it wasn't a PS2 vs. Gamecube scenario. The problem wasn't that Sony launched a year later (the Wii proved that wasn't much of an issue).
The problem was that the PS3 was(and still is) overpriced, especially considering that the tech didn't produce vastly superior results to the much cheaper Xbox 360, and the console was difficult to develop for, leading to an initial shortage of games.
