This article(post) has some serious validity. While I think they assumed numbers are quite high. I can't believe how many people are totally mis-reading this while jumping the gun.

The post is not saying that Microsoft is counting 'Refurbs' as sales. It's saying that many consumers who experienced failures out of Warranty may have gone out and just bought a new Xbox 360 entirely.

This is a valid point in many ways. For example, my Fat PS3 died on me. I could have gotten it repaired for some amount of money (150$ or something) but I instead opted to purchase the PS3 Slim for 300$ simply because I would prefer a new unit for 300$ which is less likely to break on me than a 'partially' fixed one for 150$.

So while maybe 7 million 360's aren't 're-bought' there definitely could be a significant amount of consoles that are re-purchases.

The strongest argument in this topic was "the unactive user base" vs. "the active ones", and the best signal to show this fact is the software sales, i already showed how strong the X360 active users are, the PS3 ones are barely awaking after 3 long years waiting for something juicy, but the X360 people are already playing for a long time, and they continue playing.

It's impossible to estimate the user base because there are too many variables that are unknown. How many households have 2 360s or 2 PS3s? I know for a fact that there are a few members of this site who have 2 (operational) consoles of the same make. And that's just one variable.

SW sales are irrelevant to the discussion. If 10 360 owners buy 3 games each and 15 PS3 owners buy 2 games each that's 30 games sold for each console in total but PS3 has a 50% higher install base for those 30 games than 360. Given the current apparent install base difference at the moment is only around 12% (VGC difference in LTD HW sales) using SW sales as some sort of basis for assessing the true intall base is more flawed than the arguments used in the OP.

I know many people are determined to claim that 90% of Slim sales are to the existing PS3 install base so the PS3 install base is way lower than the LTD figures imply. While I think the anti-PS3 crowd are over-stating things, I also think a not insignificant number of phat owners did go out and get a slim, and that buying behaviour does make the install base very difficult to determine.

Give it up I say. It's a fruitless discussion that can never arrive at a definitive conclusion.

I've always maintained that PS3 and 360 are effectively tied this gen. Sony fell down, MS stepped up and they arrived at the same place. I think that's how this gen is going to play.

In terms of consoles sold- MS has the 5m advantage. In terms of userbase, i'd wager the two systems are closer than the 5m separation suggests. ah well, the best anyone here can do is speculate. we don't know who bought repeats of the system for either party.

I think the OP raises some good points. I don't think he's 100% right about the numbers. Most likely they are either pretty much even or the 360 is leading by a mil or two. Another point is that MS didn't actually extend the warranty until July 5th, 1997, or over 1 1/2 after its release. Up until that time MS had claimed that their failure rates were in the industry norm, ~7%, and that the failures were due to customer fault. So during that time, customers didn't really have much of a choice, either buy a new system and all new games for it, or repurchase the 360. I'm guessing quite a bit chose the later.

Also, this is just someone's opinion guys, so just cool it a little. He never said MS counts repairs as sales, or that VGC is in on some conspiracy to help the image of MS (I'm looking at you, kowenicki). It's just a conclusion he came to after racking the numbers. It may not be completely accurate, but that's no reason to call him a troll or flamebaiter. I think half the people who are labeled trolls wouldn't be if people didn't get so worked up over opinions. Besides, in the end, no one can prove him wrong, just like he can't prove himself true without reasonable doubt.

I've always wondered how they count "repaired" and "resold" units.

You might be right about the total userbase number but I beleive everyone still forgetting another fact of why the PS3 could be already ahead, the 360 had sold (by the data) 40*10^6 so far and PS3 34 and and they have one YEAR ahead of sales.  now how bad microsoft would look if somehow Sony catch up to them with the year ahead of sales.  IMO Sony is already winning this generation

Man a lot of people are coming in here to bash. I could believe this assumption since i personally had my 360 RROD 3 times and know many friends and family members who bought an elite after getting tired of dealing with the RROD on the early consoles. Out of the people i know with ps3s I've never known anyone who has had a problem or even bought a slim to replace their chromed out phat ps3(pretty hot and tempting ps3) And before people say they are dumb Microsoft pays to repair them. Well at the time Microsoft charged $150.00 to repair a console you bought a little more than 90 days ago. I build computers so i repaired the 360's for free but they still kept getting RROD after months to a year of usage. Before anyone says i didn't know what i was doing ;even Microsoft repaired consoles were relapsing after usage.

A few people have posted on the last couple of pages that the OP actually made some good points and I thought it would be good to go back and show that he actually didn’t make any good points other than some basic facts about failure rates.  Other than that his post was wrong on every level.

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While PS3 has been continually outselling Microsoft's Xbox 360 worldwide ever since the price-reduced slim model of PS3 was released in September 2009, so far supposedly 39 Million Xbox 360s have been sold to consumers around the world, versus 34 Million PS3s. But is the userbase of Microsoft's Xbox 360 really larger than that of PS3 or could PS3 possibly be ahead already? There is much evidence in favor of this assumption.

As we know, Microsoft was forced to extend the warranty of Xbox 360 to three years to compensate for the extremely high failure rate, which a recent survey found to be at 42% total. Unfortunately, the survey does not differentiate between early (2005-2008) and later models of Xbox 360, which are apparently much more durable.

So far there have been five major revisions of the 360's hardware. The dreaded "Red Ring of Death" (RRoD) mostly occured in models made before late 2008: Xenon (2005-2006), Zephyr (2006-2007), Opus (2007) and Falcon (2007-2008), with each subsequent revision having lower failure rates. The worst failure rate occured in the first revision (Xenon); quite possibly above 66%. Jasper was introduced in late 2008 / early 2009, and anecdotal evidence points to it having a much more reasonable failure rate; probably well below 10%.

Xenon is now out of warranty: In late 2008, the 3-year warranty ended for those 360s sold in 2005/2006.

First big error, during the beginning of the RRod 360’s that were replaced had their warranties extended an additional 3 years, (I should know my 2005 360’s warranty will expire in sept of 2010).  It has been pointed out now that the warranty only extends to a year after, probably done because reliabilty has increased dramatically.

Most of these did fail at least once during the three year period, and more than half of those that failed, failed more than once. The reason for this is that Microsoft didn't exchange defective Xenons with Falcons or Jaspers but with fixed Xenons. It is therefore safe to assume that many have failed again since the warranty ran out. In 2010, warranty runs out for the Zephyr & Opus revisions.

To sum it up, from November 2005 until late 2007, rougly 15.8 Million Xbox 360s were sold, which comprise the hardware revisions with the worst failure rates (Xenon, Zephyr, Opus). To make things simple, let's assume 60% of them died (or are eventually going to die) out of warranty = 9.4 Million. It's a given that most people who built up a library of games and play games online with their friends won't simply abandon 360 alltogether just because their out of warranty console fails; they will buy a replacement.

Big Error #2, it’s cheaper to send the 360 into Microsoft instead of buying a new console. For $129 they will fix an out of warranty console, (of course as many posters have already stated most CS reps will place the tag as a warranty repair anyway at no cost to the consumer).

For simplicity's sake, let's assume 3/4 buy a new one, which equals roughly 7 Million. Now, if we substract this number from the total number of Xbox 360s sold, we arrive at 32 Million. If we only count active 360s, we also have to substract those 2.4 Million failed 360s that were not replaced. And this is probably it, the real install base of Xbox 360: 29.6 Million.

This paragraph is actually just crazy talk, I personally enjoyed the random number he chose to represent the number of nonexistent 360 owners who purchase new 360’s based off of the above mentioned error’s.

PS3 on the other hand reportedly has a failure rate of 8%; let's assume that 2/3 of the defects occured outside of Sony's 1-year warranty (=5.28%, or 1.79 Million), and that 3/4s of those who encountered a defect eventually bought a new PS3 (=1.34 Million), then we arrive at an install base of 32.21 Million.

Since we don't have precise numbers regarding failure rates, the above figures should be taken with a grain of salt.

However, the conclusion is simple: As of 2010, PS3 most likely has a larger install base than Xbox 360.

I think this guy could actually think 2+2=5

Source

I agree with his conclusion, but his method of getting there is downright asinine. There's only one clue that'll tell us which console has a bigger install base, and that is software sales.

The ps3 now regularly sustains higher software sales than the 360. The 360 has retaken the lead this past week upon the launch of Splinter Cell, but it'll only beat the ps3 by around 100k units despite Splinter Cell's 530k opening week. Splinter Cell's opening has easily surpassed last week's sales for God of War III, MLB 10: The Show, Heavy Rain, MAG, and White Knight Chronicles (in other words every ps3 exclusive released this year) combined, so you can't simply blame this on "the ps3 having more heavy hitters recently." Looking at the NA/Others sales for last week, the total of all five of those games only accounted for ~173k units, less than a third that of Splinter Cell.

The ps3 simply performs better with multiplatform titles now. Final Fantasy, Dante's Inferno, and Bayonetta all sold better on ps3 from day one, and titles like Darksiders and Assassin's Creed II have shown better legs on ps3. The ps3 version of Darksiders will actually surpass the 360 version in just 3-4 weeks due to its legs. Going back to much older titles, you'll also see games like Call of Duty 4 and Grand Theft Auto IV selling better on ps3 on a weekly basis.

Shooters and WRPGs like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Just Cause 2, and Dragon Age: Awakening still sell better on 360 (though in Just Cause's case, just barely), and most other genres perform better on ps3, like JRPGs (FF, RoF), fighters (SFIV, Tekken 6), racers (NFS), hack n' slash (Bayonetta, DI), and third person action games in general (ACII, Darksiders, Batman: AA).

Take a look at the top 100 for the week ending April 10th and you'll find these multiplatform titles:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Assassin's Creed II
Final Fantasy XIII
Just Cause 2
Call of Duty: World at War
Fist of the North Star
Fifa 2010
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Fallout 3
Resident Evil 5
Tekken 6
MLB 2K6 (lol)
GTA IV
Madden 2010
Dante's Inferno
Bioshock 2
Pure
Lego Batman
Aliens vs Predator
Prototype
PES 2010
Need for Speed: Shift

23 games, only 7 of which sold better on 360 last week. Two of those that sold better on 360 did so because they were bundled (Lego Batman, Pure) and another because it was thoroughly trounced by a ps3 exclusive (MLB 2k10).

In the eyes of third parties, you can tell which console they perceive to have the higher install base.