Bodhesatva said:
I totally agree, I think people are just misreading. There are probably 5.5 million+ PS3 in the channel now (including those sold to consumers and those sold to retailers). Sony needs to push 5.5 million more in the next 9 months -- including Christmas -- to achieve this goal. What's so wierd about that? I suppose they might not reach it, but it certainly isn't an absurd claim. |
Consider that at the 5.5 million number they have (or had) about 2 million in the retail channel and warehouses. They cannot reproduce that unless they decide to pile a lot more in warehouses and they cannot reproduce the numbers they saw at their launch in each region, where their sales were very significant in Europe. In the interest of finding the most accurate possible numbers, consider this:
- Sony sold 3.3 and had 5.5 million shipped as of March 31. The 2.2 million other units were in stores and warehouses, but that number should not grow but should be maintained.
- Factoring out the 2.2 million that Sony will try to keep in stores and warehouses, they need to sell 8.8 million total to consumers.
- This means they need to sell about 5 million more units in 9 months and Sony isn't even close to 500K units/month world wide.
- Christmas will likely be much less generous to Sony this year than it was to Microsoft last year. Microsoft had more games out, was the only console in stock, and had a $100 rebate in many areas leaving their flagship product only $299.
It is possible they'll reach 11 million units shipped (er, sold ;) by March 31, 2008, but unless it outperforms Microsoft's 2006 Holiday season this year, that's pretty unlikely.
[Edit] Holy balls. They believe they'll have 16.5 million units shipped total as of March 31, 2008? Are they insane? It would have to be outperforming the Xbox 360 significantly for a long period to accomplish that! For reference, Microsoft shipped about 11 million total in the same timeframe and that was with channel stuffing.
