You're missing the point. They can't cut the prices any more without taking huge losses because they are already selling well below cost in Japan. And they can't get more developers to make games because the install base is so small in Japan.

Hey fishy Joe I reported the posts made by Girl Gamer Elite. She appears to be trolling on the PS3. The posts she made clearly could upset alot of PS3 owners or people wanting to but a PS3. PS3 is good value it costs alot more for a standalone Blu-Ray player.

She had some good points, I think the forced blu-ray really turned me off.

Why does it always go to the arguing that when game XXX gets here it will save Ps3 ?

Ps3 needs all those listed above to get it going, as good as Wii. (doubt that will that be enough)

I am with punisher, PS3 has cutting edge technology and will improve and improve. PS3 will be around for 10 years. No PC could last 10 years.

... maybe because MGS4 and the 3 FFXIII games are still not out . Sorry , I know it could be dumb , but Im new to this site :P

Grow up people , and forget already all this dumb threads ...

@bigjon

Actually, BR is pretty good investment and rather cheap with PS3. It's the only thing which Sony had on their side, in fact. Their stake was advanced technology, but they didn't give a fcuk about developers. So they lost 3rd party exclusives and casual games are all turned to Wii. Hence PS3 is so much of crap now. Well, they deserve it since long ago, anyway.

I was not talking about the Wii. The Wii will keep selling, but it doesn't mean that the PS3 is dead. In Japan, Sony still has an strong brand in the Playstation. PS3 will do admirable sales eventually, I am sure of it.

I'd call it 1 of 4 things.

1) Historically the Japanese market only adopts one console at a time. They tend to pick early in a generation and stick with it.

2) Lack of Japanese centric gaming. There is a pretty big lack... well aside from Gundam beign thrown in the name of stuff. Some of the "big" japanese titles are there, but the small ones aren't... and some of the big ones have moved on.

3) Japanese stock market sucked lately. How's the rest of their economy?

4) Build up to "Golden Week"? Seems way to early for that but who knows.

Everyone: Stop bringing up RE5. We have no idea where that game is going. Same with KH3. I doubt many people are buying consoles for games that haven't even been announced yet, and if they are, and that game doesn't go to the console they bought, then they must care enough about the game to go out and get whatever console it is on. Edit: Still applies for KH3... lol

I'm not saying that MGS4, GT5, FF13 won't help the PS3... it's just that it won't help it enough to blast it forward like so many people expect it to. Looking at this graph, shows the boost that the PS2 got (in Japan) from GT3 and FFX (the two biggest sellers for those series on the PS2). With a base of 35k (which might be low) as the "average without new releases/price cuts/etc", those two games helped the PS2 by about... 850k, and that's being generous. If we would consider the base to be closer to 40k, then it only helped it by about 650k. For the record, the average weekly sales during this period was 58k.

If we apply this to the PS3, it has average weekly sales of 30k year to date. I expect it to drop a little bit more, since DMC4 didn't provide a healthy (or lasting) boost, so I expect the average to fall to 25k or so over the course of the year. With 5 weeks or so accounted for holiday boosts, and 6 weeks already accounted for this year, that's another 1.03 million, plus holiday sales are usually 25-35% of the total year sales. Up to that point (the start of the holiday season), the PS3 would have sold (in Japan), 1.21 million, so holiday sales would be 520k or so (with the holiday being 30% of the total yearly sales), for a total of 1.73 million. Now give it the boost that FF13 and GT5 and MGS4 (even though as far as I know, only MGS4 has an actual release date in 2007), and it'd come to 2.58 million, putting the PS3 at roughly 4.5 million in Japan. I'd even give it an additional 500k to since when those games (FFX, GT3) came out, there were more people with PS2s (i.e. less people needed to get one) so the boost should be bigger for the PS3. So 500k to be nice. That's 5 million.

On the flip slide, the Wii should be average of maybe 60k through the year, 41 weeks left * 60k = 2.46 million. 30% of total yearly sales = holiday sales, so (2.46 + 500k first 6 weeks))/70% = total yearly sales = 4.23 million, for a total in Japan of roughly 9.1 million.

Now these calcuations I think I'm being super fair, and also note that these numbers would actually cut the Wii's lead in Japan from 2.75:1 to 1.82:1.

So is the PS3 in trouble in Japan? Not yet. You can't look at GC and PS3 sales and say "oh the PS3 isn't selling better than the GC was in Japan at this point." By the time the GC got to where the PS3 is now, the PS2 had over 10 million in Japan. The competition was too far ahead and too strong. Thus the GC sold poorly. The situation is a lot less dire in Japan, with only 5.37 million Wiis vs. 1.95 PS3s. The PS3 has to do 2 things this year: it has to move consoles, and it has to show it can move software as well.

And in the same sense, the Wii has to prove that too. No sense having a higher userbase if it can't move software.