WW UP-20th August

[Reasonable]

Michael-5 said:

CGI-Quality said:

PS3 did 2k short of what I expected (180k). Not bad, I think it may stretch to 195-200k next week, but not much more. This cut won't have anywhere near the effect the 2009 cut had (although it wasn't in a position where it needed that anyway, considering it's been winning week after week since the start of the year).

It's November & December where I think we'll see the cut's true effect. The 3DS looks good too, although I wonder how long this cut's effect will sustain.

Do you think it's enough for PS3 to break 2010 sales, or even 2009? Sony says they expect 15 million for thier fiscal year, but with this small of a boost, I don't see PS3 annual sales for 2011 breaking 13 million.

I don't know about 15 million but I wouldn't try and extrapolate too much from the initial boost.  It's a real quiet time of the year and therefore any cut was simply going to get the minimal spike without any big new SW.  The price cut seemed timed to me to get PS3 ready to be more attractive during the glut of games releasing through September and up to the big December spike.  We won't really know how well the PS3 price cut worked until January 2012 TBH.

It's pretty obvious from current comments that MS is probably not going to officially cut the RRP but will use bundles and other promotional offers to essentially offer a price cut from the consumer perspective (consumers seeing a promotion and a price cut as equally attractive, in fact often promotions are seen as more attractive for a short period) and counter the PS3 price cut without having to formally annouce an ongoing permenant price reduction.

Going to be an interesting close to 2011 from a sales perspective, with each HD platform releasing big exclusives plus a lot of big multi-games as well with the hardware cheaper than ever whether due to promotions or price cuts.