I don't see Sony dropping their price at all, because they need to start making money on the hardware.

I think their estimate is unrealistic. The only way I could see them meeting their forecast is if they drop the price by $100 (which would cost them hundreds of millions of dollars), if Move is a big success and Natal / 360 Slim launch is a bust. That's a lot of ifs.

I hope they're not expecting GT5 / LBP2 / Move to increase sales without a price cut?

Personally I see sales staying at 13.0m for next year.

Another take on this would be to look at total consoles sold in a given year. For 2009, we have 47.21m sold. For 2010, we have 43.53m sold. If 360 sales are 10m in 2011 (and I only see this happening if Natal is huge), then we would have 43m sold. I don't find it probably that total sales would not drop this late in the generation.

I am looking forward to E3 to see if they have some huge announcement to prove me wrong.

I happen to agree...think it will end up like 18m for Wii (-2.5m), 13-14m PS3 (0- to +1m), and ~8-9m X360. Odds are PS3 will be way up until the price cut...in Sept. After that flat or down barring a modest cut, and it may not do much if Nintendo cuts price first or if Natal performs well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7Wvzgi5cpc&feature=PlayList&p=52EB70F61A29C7D1&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=4

Ballmer at CES 2010. Five minutes into the video he says that "since we launched the first Xbox, more than 500 million games have been sold [shipped to retail worldwide through December 2009] accounting for more than $20 billion in revenue".

March 2010 SW LTD by System (Years over 15m)

PS2 - roughly 1513m (9 years)

PS1 - 962m (10 years)

DS -718.5m (5 years)

Wii - 544.8m (3.5 years)

GB - 501.1m (12 years)

NES - 500.1m (8 years)

SNES - 379.1m (6 years)

GBA - 377.3m (6 years)

X360 - 336m? Estimated (4 years)

PS3 - 290.5m (3 years)

PSP - 251m (4.5 years)

N64 - 225.0m (5 years)

Xbox - 218m? Estimated (5 years)

GC - 208.5m (5 years)

Gen - 169m? Estimated (4 years)

Sat - 86m? Estimated (3 years)

DC - 63m? Estimated (2 years)

So Wii has sold as much software in 3.5 years as both Xbox consoles in a combined 9 years?

HW Shipment LTDs:

PS2 - 144.5m (March 2010)

DS - 128.89n (March 2010)

Wii - 70.93m (March 2010)

PSP - 61.50m (March 2010)

X360 - 41.70m (June 2010)

PS3 - 35.70m (March 2010)

Those are the updated LTD shipment figures.

Not a lot of difference between PS3 n X360 software.. is it really this close now.? 

It might be - as I said though the X360 shipments are estimated. The overwhelming majority of X360 sw is sold in the USA, UK, Australia and Canada. Attach rates and hw sales are far lower elsewhere.

A lot of people have been calling for PS3 sales to remain steady over the next few years which will allow the console to push toward 100 million. That seems unlikely given the typical sales curve for a console. I'm curious to know your take on the situation, Source, specifically on when the PS3 will hit $200 and what will happen for sales at that time...I'm fairly sure you don't expect the PS3 to leg out 100 million in sales?

With the Nintendo Conference tonight, we should finally get a projection for 3DS shipments / 3DS SW shipments for the year ending March 2011, seperate from DS HW / SW.