Borkachev on 15 June 2008
The fact they needed a bundle to pull this off too is kind of worrisome as well. Most new games aren't given a wheelchair to help them out into the market. All that remains now is to see if this actually allows Sony to usurp Nintendo for just one week, because if this game can't do it, then that's just a sad sign for the PS3.
Can we possibly bend this news any more to twist it into a negative?
A wheelchair? A 70k boost? The bundles made up a whole five percent of MGS4 sales. That's absolutely nothing. They could have sold any number of bundles that they'd made -- they didn't, but that's a poor management decision, not a "sad sign for the PS3."
PS3 selling 120k this week is a good thing. But 70k were the special editions that are now gone. So if you take away those people who special ordered them up front and were obviously waiting for their console, you are left with a pretty average week of 50k.
What possible justification is there to simply toss out those 70k consoles? There's nothing "invalid" about those sales. And the special editions aren't gone, the first shipment is. There are hundreds of thousands of people like me who couldn't find one on week 1. We'll keep buying just as fast as Sony lets us.
And 40gb sales are completely irrelevant. The 40gb sucks. It's a poor value compared to the MGS4 bundle, and it lacks a feature that many gamers consider essential. People aren't buying it because they're holding out for the 80gb. If the low-end bundle was just a pile of cow shit in a box and it sold poorly, would you be saying that's a bad sign for overall PS3 sales?
