More examples about the PS3 software selling well .

This is EA fiscals result and money brought by each plattform to the company :

PlayStation 2: $301 million
Xbox 360: $196 million
PC: $148 million
Nintendo Wii: $139 million
Nintendo DS: $122 million
PlayStation 3: $102 million
PlayStation Portable: $74 million
Mobile: $38 million
Xbox: $3 million
Game Boy Advance: $2 million
GameCube: $1 million

We see the PS3 trailing the 360 and the Wii but once we consider the games released for each system

Mobile Games: 13
PlayStation 2: 7
Nintendo Wii: 7
Xbox 360: 5
PlayStation 3: 5
Nintendo DS: 5
PC: 4
PlayStation Portable: 4
iPod: 4
Mac: 3


we can clearly see that not only it does improve A LOT over the results of the prior quarter but that it is bringing about the same money per game as the other next gen machines specially considering userbase (so no ,not "bought as BR player " crap ).Other interesting thing is the PSP and DS here ....DS brings more money but with more games and the PSP at least is substantially contributing to EA income .Not the terrible sales news we see in the charts on this page for sure .

Here is the link to the info

http://kotaku.com/353126/the-ps2-is-still-buttering-eas-bread

Now PS3 is doing fine, but the Blu ray sales my help if the Blu camp can con America into making Blu a big format.

Successful to me is a console that eventually reaches 10%+ of the total population of a country/region.  For simplicty, say the 10% is the total population of the country in the second June from launch.

So for the USA, 30.5 million+ will be my bar for success for PS3 and Wii in the USA.  Xbox 360 will have it more like 30.3 million+.  

Essentially this limits 'successful' USA consoles to

NES (~23 million needed to be mainstream, shipped over 30 million)

PS1 (~27 million needed to be mainstream, sell through in the mid to high 30 millions probably)

PS2 (~28 million needed to be mainstream, sellthrough north of 42 million)

My take is Wii ends up in the 35 million+ range in the USA - high enough to top everything but PS1.  Can't see PS3 or Xbox 360 topping past 30 million in the USA, although I think Xbox 360 will be less than 15% away as the SNES was.  Xbox 360 is tracking similarly to the N64 in the USA and Canada, but will likely improve a bit with price cuts to say SNES levels (23 million).  If all the SKUs are under $200 for 360 by the start of 2010, I can see it hitting 26-28 million in the USA, effectively doubling Xbox one in the USA.  PS3 I see having the lowest peak of the three in the USA, but with much more gradual declines.  A top year of 5-6 million, with only 10-20% declines for years after would be their best case scenario, and it would produce something like .7-2.5-3.5-5.5-4.8-4-3.5-2.7-2-1-.3 (in million/year).

A realistic, industry wide best case scenario breakdown would be like this in the USA:

Xbox 360:  0.6  3.9  4.6  5.0  4.4  3.4   2.7   2.0  1.1  .6 

Wii                    1.1  6.6  8.0  8.8  7.0   5.5   4.0   2.7   1.6  .9   .2  

PS3                   0.7  2.5  3.3  4.5  4.0   3.5   2.8   1.8   1.0  .4  

                 05'   06'   07'  08'   09'  10'  11'   12'    13'   14'   15'  16' 

Together that would mean more people were interested in HD TV/Blu Ray than what Wii offers (27+24 for 360 and PS3, respective, 51 million combined, 47 million for Wii), but I don't see either of them becoming dominant or reaching 10% of USA population in June 2007/2008 (.1 x 303/305 million)

The question in this thread was "Now that Blu-Ray has won, will the PS3 become successful (in America)?" so it doesn't matter what happens worldwide

Beyond that my discussion was what can/will happen in the US economy in the near future, not what is currently happening today; being that the US economy is so dependant on consumer consumption, which is heavily hurt by lower home values and the credit crunch (which are both going to get much worse over the next 12 to 18 months), it is not unreasonable to expect that unnecessary luxury item purchases will decline in the future.

As for your comment on the Canadian labour market ... You can't just look at the unemployment rate across two countries on its own, you must consider the labour force participation rate and in recent times Canada has had a higher participation rate than the United States; 77.9% for Canada vs. 74.9% for the United States in 2001, the most recent year of data for the United States (Canada jumped to 78.4 in 2002 and I have seen several articles about the growing participation rate in Canada since then).

The reason Canada has both a higher unemployment rate and a high participation rate is caused (in part) because in order to collect unemployment insurance from the government you had to work for a certain time frame, the UI eventually runs out so you must find another job, and you remain a participant in the work force for this entire period of time. In the United States, many people who would be unemployed as Canadians end up becomming non-participants because they're neither working nor looking for work.

Anyways, I wasn't saying the PS3 or XBox 360 would see declining sales ... Just suggesting that would need to exist in order for the PS3 or XBox 360 to see a major improvement in sales will not exist in the near future.

What i see is a PSP situation. Decent hardware sales but mediocre software sales. Now i fully believe that the ps3 will do better moving software than the psp, just not drastically and not near enough to come close to being profitable. Remember that companies make money off their systems through game sales not from hardware sales (except Nintendo who always manages to make money on their systems).. This will in fact hurt playstation. Third parties will be unwilling to make games for playstation if they dont think it will sell enough to be profitable. When the PS4 comes out it will lack third party support and will struggle to get any good games. It will take Wii like succes to convince third parties to come back. just look at the gamecube. Third parties were scared away after the n64 and so the gamecube got very little support. So basically if a lot of people buy the ps3 mainly to watch blu ray and dont buy many games, this could really kill the playstation.

Now i can be way way off in my predictions but hey, atleast my prediction has atleast a shred of of being possible, unlike 90% of the predictions these professional analysts have made these days.

We shall see. I agree with many that HD media (not HD in general) adoption will be slow (the American economy is slowing). If you look at past console sales for the previous two generations you'll see that the trend they set in the first year (and second year for PS2) continues on until the end of the that systems life. PS3 will continue to sell how well it has been selling. Blu-Ray will not help PS3 in the same way DVD helped PS2. Because it's not nearly as important a jump.

I'm not sure about the software issue anymore. I have 9 ps3 games - that's not bad for under year (PAL). So games are out there now and soon there will be too many games to choose from. I already have my games list of 08 set. So I'm hoping I have the time etc.

Anytime you bring up the future of the PS3 or Blu-Ray, the first defense you always see is the claims that the sun will be rising just over the next hill. No matter how grim, mediocre or positive the situation is, we're always made to think it will get better with little more argument put to it other than, "Give it a chance". I certainly can't prove it won't get better but its clear how the double standard of "what is console success" is weighted in the eyes of a person backing that console. What I find most interesting in such defenses of the PS3, no one even really claims they love the games out for it all that much, just that they are impressed with the number of games that are selling well.

Though, enough banter, clearly Blu-Ray is struggling even after having ousted HD-DVD as is clear by Sony giving away the damn things. If they were smart they would have pushed to make hybrid discs more inexpensive to produce and lure the market into supporting a product that could be played on DVD players as a DVD on one side and as blu-Ray on Blu-Ray players on the other. Again its the unfortunate philosophy of expecting the consumer to make the greater investment in the transaction, not themselves. Though I'm sure people would gladly work two jobs to buy a Blu-Ray player Am I right?