HappySqurriel said: Looking at the yearly hardware and software totals in Japan, it becomes clear that the PS2 and PS3 are not moving much hardware and the PSP and PS3 are not moving much software: Hardware: Console Year Total 2,860,179 16,913,437 1,428,246 2,401,714 853,129 5,467,970 432,622 905,227 328,210 21,815,246 98,596 383,910 38,378 16,682,376 6,668 4,020,318 Total 6,046,028 Software Totals: Console Year Total 14,563,879 66,706,593 4,242,387 118,359,213 3,599,239 5,637,292 2,199,738 10,815,561 720,743 1,176,122 383,670 1,276,119 194,151 46,643,808 15,714 8,646,086 4,120 21,317,638 Total 25,923,641   At the same time the DS and Wii are moving a lot of hardware and the Wii's software totals are improving at a pretty steady rate. Generally speaking, stores hate carying hardware because it is expensive, takes up a lot of space and they have (very) poor margins on it; in theory (with current sales) the store may have wanted to stop carying PS2 or PS3 hardware and Sony threatened that they couldn't sell any Playstation products if they stopped supplying PS2/PS3 hardware.

but look at the x360 hardware sales.

it is very minimal even at 250$.

the software sales of psp and ps2 are very impressive.

ofcourse compared to DS that might not be the case but the sales aof all ps products are very decent indeed.

ps3 at a high pricepoint is doing excellent in EU and decent in NA and Japan considering the killer apps are yet to arrive.

By the end of this year ps3 would regain the no1 spot in NA and Japan ...mark myn words.

In europe ps3 is doing a fantastic job despite its deflated price of 700+ $

It's probably not a dedicated game store. Probably a minimart or a toystore who carries whatever makes a easy buck. As Sony is not as easy to sell as they preferred, they probably changed it to stock whatever is popular at that moment (more Pocky! )

i guess it's a fake: psp sells well, ps2 still sells, ps3 it's still too young.....and nobody is gonna stop selling it

Wow, okay. I love baseless predictions with absolutely no grounding in reality.

A mediocre upcoming lineup, stagnating sales, and $200 pricier than the competition. Yep, Sony has the world by the balls right now.

We don't even know if this store carries XBox 360 stuff ... We don't even know if it carries any Nintendo stuff; all we do know is they stopped carying Playstation products.

larry, how do you imagine the PS3 will beat even the 360 in NA during the holiday season with Microsoft's equivalent to Mario, Halo 3? The PS3 will be lucky if it can beat the GBA, let alone any of it's brethren either, PS2 or PSP. I'd just like to know what you are basing your predictions on?

I'm not able to view the picture for whatever reason, but maybe this is just a case of a small store having limited shelf space and would rather fill it with DS / Wii games than the slower moving Sony stuff. If it's not primarily an electronics store, then this wouldn't be terribly surprising (I assume they never carried xbox or dropped it long ago). Still, not what Sony wants to see.

I agree with most of the posters, we don't have enough info to conclude that this is a poor sales situation. It sounds more like the shop has a credit issue with Sony or is simply ceasing to stock Sony products because of a distributor relationship problem. Dropping the PS2 and PSP makes little sense on the face of it, although I can see how a small shop might not want a lot of cash tied up in PS3's. Maybe they're going "software only" to make better use of space and better margins overall. We don't have the whole story here.

It's amazing to see how the sony fanboys are trying to turn this into trolling. We really don't know anything about that shop beside that it stops selling sony stuff.

I just want to tell you that a good number of shops here in switzerland have stopped selling the Gamecube also quite early in its lifecycle. Of course those shops were game stores or big electronic shops, but for example cd discounters with a game section.

So if this is true (what I think it is) it is probably showing us that PS3 is not selling good in japan at the moment. But didn't we know that already?

 O Washimul, as you wish.