Jumping to conclusions is the last thing you should do when calling other people xenophobes. I am no PS3 supporter and even I can think of reasons for Japanese to prefer the PS3 - no RROD, Blu-Ray, and yes, Japanese brand, why not? There's nothing wrong about supporting your country's brands as long as you're reasonable about it.

 Hey, where the hell have you been lately? Haven't seen you around for ages!

Anyways; yes it was very important for Sony to lower cost and consequently lower prices, and they can't very well forego the BD drive, now can they? 

Nope they can't leave out BluRay.  Their movies/entertainment division would axe murder their games division if they tried.

Lets not forget that the GC passed the PS2 several times in Japan. So even the best selling consoles including the PS2 and DS occasionally get dethroned from time to time.

I understand the whole issue here. and I agree. It's nice to see the PS3 manage to garner at least a little good news in its direction.

but i do have a few problems in the way this news is being touted.

TURNAROUND has been a word constantly tossed around here, and there is a very specific implication to that, meaning a point at which we stop going in one direction, turn and then go in another direction.

For this to be the case for the PS3, you would need the PS3 to continue selling better than the Wii from now on. 3 - 4 weeks is well and good, but it has not yet been established if this will remain the case, seeing as how the amount it outsells the Wii by decreases every week.

On top of this is the limit of the scope by which you are establishing a turnaround. This is all based purely on Japan, and not inclusive of any other region, in all of which the Wii is still soundly tromping the PS3.

I do not dismiss this as an accomplishment for the PS3, but rather, I find issue to be taken with the expectations you are implying, whether intentional or not, that this accomplishment has. Rather that a turnaround, I consider this to be more of PS3 finally managing to gain some purchase.

I don't think there is any form of turnaround.It's just a 'Normalization' in PS3 sales.Relatively spoken.

Sony sales have improved because the machine is now at an acceptable price point and have a growing software library. Things will continue to get better as more software is released.

The only negative is that to get to that point, it had to give up backwards compatability in the 40G model -- but that really means is that people will have to keep their PS2s if they want to play their PS2 games. The 80G PS3 and the Xbox 360 both offer software compatabile backwards compatability and I beleive the PS3 has a higher percentage of odler games that will play on the new console.

The Wii has slowed because it could not keep selling at the insane, fade-like rates in Japan. And it really has not had much new to offer the Japanese market (which has been described accurately as unpredictable and fickle) in recent months. The chief beneficiary of the lower demand in Japan appears to have been North America which has seen an increase in console avaiable (and where the announcement of Wii for sale can cause massive lines/queues to for very quickly).

It should be interesting to see where this pattern (of near parity) stablizes and what software releases does to this pattern. Wii Fit will probably drive sales for that unit very widely for a few weeks. But the PS3 has games on the horizon that could do the same thing -- Little Big Planet seems perfect for the Japanese market.

Try to take this as objective analysis rather than boosterism. I have a Wii -- but am still stuck in the last generation for the other two systesm (PS2 and Xbox). Mostly becasue I value my marriage more than buying another new game system.

Mike from Morgantown

well DJ Meister, it's cool, keep posting the good news... we are an unbiased site, and no-one can bash you for posting news about Sony's successes...

 It's a port of a remake and it sold about as well as the original did (within 20k launch week) - and considerably more than the previous GBC ports of DQ remakes.

 Is that out of memory, according to Media Create or something? Because on vgchartz I couldn't find a single week in Japan where the GC outsold the PS2, outside of the launch weeks.