They were on just over 2.6m at the end of March 08 (thanks to 600,000 at PS3 launch), and most people agree that they will get over 8m by the end of this year, let's assume 8.1m for ease, which would be 5.5m, that requires another 5.5m in January, Feburary and March, although it would be less if you are looking at shipments. DMC will bost sales in Japan in January, and Unreal should boost sales in Europe, there are also some other good games, maybe Prologue could boost sales in PAL/US a bit. If LBP comes out that will increase sales, but they will need 1.8m per month, will translates to roughly 458,000 sales a week. I beleive that they can get in excess of 100,000 easily, maybe 150,000, in the twelve months there will probably 1.8m sales, so in total that will be about 10m, maybe close to 10.5m shipments. I think that is the furthest they can go in total

11m LTD by March 31, 2008 is a made up number. It's not the number published in Sony's own financial documents. The only people perpetuating this number are the uninformed.

The OFFICIAL number published in Sony's own financial statements is 11m for the fiscal year of 2007 only. The previous fiscal year, as reported in Sony's own financial statements, the PS3 recorded 3.57 million shipments.

Therefor the total number of expected PS3 shipments as of March 31, 2008 is 14.57 million.

Let me repeat, 14.57m is the expected PS3 shipments as of March 31, 2008 and is clearly specified in Sony's OFFICIAL financial statements.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/fr/07q1_eleki.pdf

I could I think they'll hit 10 mil. sold pretty easily, but 11 mil. will be a stretch.

Of course, as FishyJoe said, this is shipped, not sold, and it's just for the fiscal year of '07. Whether they'll have shipped that many or not, I have no idea.

Even taking these into account doesn't mean much. Sales will still plummet below a level where they could reasonably obtain such a goal, and R&C and Uncharted are hardly pushing consoles.

They're doing it. They're actually doing it.

Sony is playing a trick here: their original analysis had 11 million total sold this fiscal year. Now they're wording it like 11 million sold total by March 2008. There's a big difference -- Sony sold about 1.5 million last fiscal year, so they'd actually have to hit 12.5ish million total to sell through 11 million this fiscal year. Which is virtually impossible: they'll hit 8-8.5 million by Christmas, and then need to sell 4 million in the slowest three months of the year where they sold something like .75 million total in 2007.

 So rather than recalculate their estimate, Sony is just sweeping the wording under the rug and hoping that people don't notice that suddenly the total estimateby March 2008 is 11 million and not 12.5 million. 

@Bod

I know, I really knew they would be doing the sneaky thing....

I would say untill that they could sell 10 million and ship maybe 13 ... but not more ...

VG chartz says that there were around 2.6m sold, and if I remember correctly the official line is that there were 3.5m shipped. There were 2m before EU launch, and thne 1m shipped then, so it makes a bit of sense.

If you look at the statement above forgetting about all previous things, it suggests that they are looking at lifetime sales

They should ship about 10 million LTD by then. Because they now track shipped to retailers though their channel stuffing abilities are very limited. Retailers don't want 2 million PS3s.

I do think it's hilarious though that they changed the wording. I really hope a major news source brings that up later.

It looks like the PS3 will have sold 8.2 Million units by the end of 2007 and January throuh March the PS3 will average 400,000 to 500,000 units per month worldwide; this will put them at  9.5 to 10 Million units sold worldwide as of March 31st 2008. This means that Sony may have 11 Million PS3 systems sold to retail by March 31st 2008 but they will fall (very) short of their projection of 11 Million PS3 systems sold in the fiscal year.