Surprise!! PS3 is doing worse in America than it is in Japan.

[Bodhesatva]

albionus said:

I agree with Stickball and Squirrel that lower software sales and the fact that we can see trends much quicker in Japan than here due to their weekly sales estimates are the main reason the PS3 is being declared near-dead sooner. I think there are a couple other reasons though.

The first is that in addition to poorer overall software sales Japan has already seen 2 huge games released that did terribly (Gundam and I forget the other, it may just be Gundam). That's normally a major indicator that a console is in trouble and since the US hasn't seen any huge games released since launch we haven't seen whether that's the case here also. The second reason Japan is ahead of the curve is because they already had a major sales holiday that caused no real increase in PS3 hardware or software sales. We'll have to wait until next year to see how the PS3 faired in its first full major sales season here.

Basically, in Japan we know PS3 sales are bad, its sales trend is even worse, a major sales period did nothing, and major games aren't selling themselves much less systems. In the US we know sales are bad, the trend seems bad but is uncertain at the moment, we're in the traditional slow sales period, and there haven't been any major games to test the viability of the system.

This is spot on. Japan has more concrete numbers to work with, and we've now seen in that country that 1) a top flight exclusive title and 2) a major holiday season haven't seriously boosted PS3 sales. There really isn't a crutch to fall back on at this point in Japan. Wait til the Holidays? We already did. Wait til the games start coming? We already have. Those arguments might fly here, but they're already come and gone over in the Rising Sun.