STEKSTAV said:
About this time last year, the PS3 was in the same spot as the 360 is today. It was on the edge of falling below 100k a week. Doomed-threads were being posted all over the interwebs. The 360 will get a nice boost on AW week, but after that its kind of slow for a while, so we'll probably see a 90k number soon enough.
The 360 has been outsold since the Slim release (Sept-May), lost the holiday sales, despite having a 199$ console it gets outsold, its in its 5th year on the market, the exclusives are far apart, its currently close to droping below the 100k mark, still no success in JP and is only on top in the US out of all regions.
Do you think the 360 has hit its peak, and is now slowly fading away?
Or do you think the 360 will survive just fine for another 4 years until the supposedly nextbox gets released?
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Nah, I see way more of a dry spell currently on PS3 actually. After God of War 3 and Heavy Rain, PS3 really has nothing huge known upcoming but GT5, and Socom Move, both of which cannot compare to Reach. At least until they unveil stuff at E3.
360 OTOH just had Splinter Cell Conviction, has the Halo Reach Beta and Alan Wake coming up. Much more hype than PS3 in the short term.
Then in the longer term 360 has the big hammer of 2010 with Reach.
This fall 360 gets a major reboot with a slim, Reach, Natal, and possibly a price drop. Any one of those factors alone would boost it, let alone all.
And actually, the 360 is fairly close to having outsold the PS3 in the USA again in the period since the PS3 Slim was introduced. Last I checked IIRC it was like 60k behind before March NPD's, and it just gained another 20k or so in March NPD.
In addition, 360 graphics are showing the old dog has a lot of life left. Reach and Alan Wake are the two best looking exclusives ever yet on the platform, and imo rival any PS3 exclusive. As well as the continuing trend of most multiplatform games looking superior on 360 (just found out Afterburner Climax for example is 4XAA on 360, 0XAA on PS3).
And yeah, dont forget profits. It's something we dont talk about but 360 (EDD division) has racked up over a billion in profits recently in the last few quarters. Sony's PS3 division OTOH has for the most part steadily lost money, often tons of it. Microsoft has given up some market share for profits.
Finally if you take Japan out of the equation, which imo is kind of a "free" market for PS3, the 360 looks a lot better. For example as of the last financials, 360 was 5.2 million shipped hardware units ahead (38.7 360 to 33.5 PS3) but then PS3 is about 4 million ahead in Japan, making the gap elsewhere some 9 million for 360. And dont forget the west is a self contained market, as EA and Activision and Ubisoft sell very few games in Japan.
