As has been mentioned, it's a shipped versus sold thing. It would not be unreasonable to assume that on average, every Gamestop in the USA has 5 unsold PS3s across all the models. And more systems are in their warehouse, and still others are stocked for the website. Factor in the rest of the companies who sell games, and the rest of the countries where Sony has a prescence, and 2 million in the retail chain sounds feasible, normal, even. With worldwide sales, that's about 3 months of inventory. To be honest, I'd also not be surprised if some stores placed larger than normal orders given the shortage of them in recent history, trying to help weather if it would continue. And sales are good enough that stores are willing to keep the stock, even if seen as excessive, because it will sell. Factor in the multiple levels of some larger companies (like Best Buy) which have to stock systems at each level for distribution, and it's even easier to see- these larger systems also take more time to get products through, and thus, require more product in it to avoid a shortage anywhere in the chain.
And, under normal circumstances, I'd leave this open as a question about the sold vs shipped argument, even though that's answered on the methodology page. But with the subject of this thread being seen as a potential attack on the site, I'm locking this up to prevent things from going in that direction.
-dunno001
-On a quest for the truly perfect game; I don't think it exists...
