Is PS3 REALLY selling that badly?

[Andir]

Biggerboat said:

libellule said:

I aggry with the topic
PS3 sales are not so bad

The implicite point of Andir comment was some thing like this :
PS3 suffers from expensive price AND no games, and even knowing this,
PS3 sales = Xbox360 sales

It's no good selling the same as 360, it has a year of sales to make up for before it can think about giving dev's the slightest incentive to develop exclusive titles which is the only thing that'll move PS3 in significant numbers. Sony pretty much has to hit the ball out the park this winter if it's to have any chance at even a 2nd place finish this gen. I think this would be easier for everyone to accept if it wasn't a PS branded console that was failing

 I really don't think it matters if it sells the same as the 360.  At that pace, and with some really cool games (IMHO) I think it should start selling just a bit better than that.  Considering the 360 has been hovering around that 10 million mark and the obvious issues it's having with quality control, the PS3 has a very good chance of overtaking the 360.

It won't happen this Christmas (if it does, I'd be really surprised) but you have to consider a few facts.  The 360 ended it's supply issues at about March after it's release.  We are beyond that in terms of aligned sales and the PS3 is still selling at a par level with it (and it didn't have any competition besides the PS2.)  The PS2 is still selling respectibly.  To me, this translates into people not wanting to jump on the 360/PS3 level hardware until either the 360 or PS3 decide who is moving.

The price is also a factor here.  When the prices start to come down the Playstation brand has the most "well known" franchises behind it and I think it will grow to overtake.  Microsoft sees this and they've been dumping gobs of money at the developers to keep or snatch exclusivity (because they have to.)  Also while on the topic of Microsoft, they've not been able to recoup from the losses of the original XBox nor the 360.  They are technically still in debt though the claim is that they are now making money on the 360 and yet they still haven't lowered the price to keep the sales up.  Obviously, they are trying to get as much of that loss buried as they can, and they will likely hold the price until Sony makes their move.  You have to consider that the 360 has basically been selling to the same crowd that bought the original XBox.  The game selection has been pretty much the same, being heavy on the FPS titles.

Now, as far as all those PS2 sales.  The games are still coming.  People see that.  The games are also more varied than the other two choices.  Sure... you have a couple games that break the norm, but it doesn't go much further than that.  They also see that the PS3 has the best backwards compatible library.  Some games are even offering incentives to those that are thinking about getting a PS3 by including higher resolution settings.  This could arguably mean that these PS2 users decided to jump into gaming on something now that they can soon take all the games they buy and just put them into the PS3 if/when they get it down the road.

 Of course, all this could change in the future but with Microsoft being stubborn about pricing and quality I don't see much a a shift in their favor.

As far as developing difficulties.  Nintendo may be the easiest to develop for, I won't argue there.  Microsoft may not be far behind since they do tend to produce some quality development tools on the PC, but The Cell architecture is not all that hard to develop for (yes, I have done Cell development.)  The hardest part in the development process on the Cell platform is deciding what to task the 8 available threads with (2 threads for the PPU, 1 per SPU)  (As a side note here, the 360 only has 6 available threads and they are all generic process threads not designed to crunch numbers)   In the Cell, six of these threads are specialized.  But they are specialized to take care of tasks suited for HD gaming.  These include physics, vector calculations like camera movement and character movement, backface culling, object transformations (animations, movement, object effects, etc.) which are usually done in the video buffer.  These can now be done before they even hit the video buffer and save some memory and video processing cycles for other tasks.  If using Cell side backface culling, your only sending half the object data to the video buffer (thus you only need half the available memory for this type of thing)  Sure it's not the standard method used today, but it's no more difficult per say.  You just have to call a different function.  Some developers get "stuck in a rut" when it comes to developing.  They don't like to change what works and they grow to depend on hardware not changing.  This is why PC development has been struggling to get into the multi-core and multiprocessor systems and it's also why these devs say it's hard to program the Cell.