this post just gave me an image of a last place runner passing up the winners house just to say i win cause i'm still running.

i'm sure as long as said consoles are bing tracked, they'll be talked about. regardless the gen. can't wait to talk about PS2 when the 8th gen. starts.

I'm not a particularly big Sony fan but they do deserves huge props for how they managed to turn the PS3's fortunes around, it was looking dire for quite some time.

Having said that, even if PS3 manages to crawl past the Wii's total sales, that's not really a win, not in any meaningful sense. It will be a great milestone, given the start that the PS3 had, but that's it. You are comparing a system that, in the end , will have sold about the same numbers, the majority in about half the time and earned it's makers billions of dollars profit within the space of 3-4 years, with a system that slowly achieved the same sales and, although now profitable, cost its makers billions of dollars.

People seem to now forget the 6 billion dollar hole the PS3 created in Sony's finances. Sony have made the best of a bad start and in the process made many gamers very happy, but they will never make that money back. Sales are great but in the end, for all console makers, they are purely a means to earn profit.

those pricecuts won't happen with the exception of the 2013. the next pricecut will likely happen in 2016, and the console won't be discontinued.

The PS3 has been available in China for quite some time. it is sold through an official Chinese distributor. The price is so high though that the numbers are irrelevent compared to the black market.

yea i heard. does it put launch prices to shame?

lol, no. Not going to happen. The PS3 is 23 million units behind a (slowly) moving target. The PS4 has already been announced, and it's not long (~7 months, barring delays) until marketing starts for it.

The PS3 doesn't have the install base to justify annual releases of sports games etc that the PS2 got.

They are wrong by the way with the "Wii sales dropped because it can't play dvds. That is rubbish. Wii sales dropped when games stopped releasing. The ability to play dvds or blu rays will not extend the PS3's life - it needs new games to avoid sales plummeting. It will have a good year this year, but Sony has moved most of its effort to Vita or PS4, and 3rd parties are shifting to the next gen too.

The PS3 will get decent sales from here, but not close to the 25 M+ it needs to outsell the Wii.

lol just wait guys... just wait... I will serve a lot of crow in this thread

Yeah, I don't understand where people get this notion that China is a big and vital market for consoles, its really not. Same goes for India. I guess people are thinking high population = high sales, an incredibly simplistic way of seeing things that reveals a complete lack of understanding of economics, markets and cultural difference. It was the same with the outlandish Wii predictions, "Oh, just wait till the Wii launches in China and India, it will be madness!" The Chinese market won't to much for the PS3 and even if it did, the results would be in, China is not like the 3rd world or super poor developing countries where the adoption rates lie half a decade or a whole decade behind the West. If anything, Chinese middle class, the most likely customers for consoles, will have the same adoptation patterns as Korea and Japan.

This folly needs to stop.

Yea, I'm sure stores are different all over the country.  But I think that overall most stores stopped carrying the PS2 somwhere around late 2010 - early 2011.  Which is nowhere close to the 2008 that Republic suggested.  I mean NPD tracked it up until March 2010, where it sold 118K in that in the US alone. 

PS3 should be closer to 85M shipped by the end of the year.  With the price cut, and most likely a few more exclusives and plenty of multiplats, I think it will be at ~92M by the end of 2014.  ~98M by the end of 2015, with a cut to $149.  ~102M by the end of 2016.  It'll probably continue to sell a few million after that, and MAY get a price cut to $99 (I'm expecting that $149 is where Sony will stop with cuts, though) so 105M-110M is definitely not out of the question.