The PS3 beat the 360 in May and EEDAR's Jesse Divnich expects this pattern to continue, in part because of exclusives like Metal Gear Solid 4. Divnich also believes a price cut on 360 may be announced at E3 next month.
by James Brightman on Thursday, June 12, 2008
Following the release of the impressive May video game sales data, EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich has weighed in with a few comments. Perhaps his most interesting observation was in regards to the effect that exclusive PS3 titles have on hardware adoption – apparently, games exclusive to PS3 do a far better job of driving hardware sales than games exclusive to Xbox 360 or Wii.
Examining the data, he commented: "Sony's PlayStation 3 can claim a relative small victory as its hardware unit sales were up 150% over last year; additionally, they managed to outpace their closest rival, Microsoft's Xbox 360. This will likely continue in June as we expect Metal Gear Solid 4 [to] act as a bigger catalyst in terms of driving PS3 hardware sales than did Grand Theft Auto IV. This is likely due to the exclusivity factor as exclusive releases on Sony's platforms have historically shown to be a better hardware driver than that of multi-platform releases. On average, PS3 exclusive games sell 45% more, throughout their lifetime, than multi-platform titles available on the PS3. Exclusive titles for the other two systems, the Wii and Xbox 360, only boast a small increase in lifetime sales over multi-platform titles. Of course, in all fairness, the first year of Xbox 360 titles were pretty much all exclusive since the other systems were not available on the market."
Divnich also believes that Microsoft is preparing to make a price cut announcement on its hardware at the upcoming E3 summit in July: "With E3 around the corner, we can expect Microsoft to make some type of announcement regarding a hardware price cut, the introductory of a new hardware SKU with new features, or both. If there is a hardware price cut, it is not known if Sony will follow suit right way, but it would be safe to assume that Sony would execute some type of plan within a 2 month window of any hardware price cut from the Xbox 360."
On the handheld side, although Sony's PSP had been experiencing a surge in early 2008, it would appear that business is slowing for the portable again. "For the first time this year, PSP year-over-year sales were in the negative at 17% decrease. This trend will likely continue, as we do not see any significant PSP titles in the short-term pipeline that could drive hardware sales in Sony's favor," Divnich noted. "Furthermore, PSP software has consistently been last in software unit sales among the next-generation consoles and handhelds. Additionally, the PSP was the only console not to have a title in the top 10 of unit sales, even the PS2 managed to creep into the top ten with sales from Iron Man."
