I'm not trying to cast any doubt on VgChartz methods I'm just curious about the PS3 numbers which seem strikingly low.  If it has in fact sold under four million at this point does it have any chance of breaking ten million by year's end?  Can someone lend some context to this and tell us roughly how many 360's Microsoft had sold at this time?  I understand the the holiday season is approaching, and that Sony is bound to sell many PS3's at that time, but it seems like a stretch to predict six or more million being sold over the holidays.

I direct your attention here...

http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=PS3&reg1=All&cons2=PS3&reg2=All&cons3=X360&reg3=All&align=1

Thats a graph of the PS3 and 360 with aligned launch dates so you can see how they are doing at identical points in their lifespan.

VGChartz's numbers are estimated to be around +/-15% accuracte - at least that's what I remember from one of ioi's posts - and he's in charge of the site.

It's accurate enough for my purposes, and it's accurate enough within reason to say that the current numbers pretty much reflect current sales for all three consoles. 

Therein lies the difference between the anecdotal and the statistical.

VGChartz does slightly undertrack PS3, if I remember correctly, but "slightly" is the key word here.

Sony only releases "units shipped" or "sold to retail," which is different from sell-trhough to consumer. Their numbers and VGChartz aren't realy comparable.

There are external sources that effectively back VGChartz' numbers in Japan, America, and to a lesser extent, Europe. 

The NPD releases industry-standard figures every month. Last month, the PS3 was outsold by the Wii 4:1 in America. Famitsu and Media Create, two Japanese firms, release Japanese data weekly. They have the Wii outselling the PS3 at approximately a 6:1 or even 7:1 clip over the last month. That ratio has been increasing, by the way: it was 6:1 in June, 5:1 in May, 4:1 in April. 

Europe is the hardest to track, but there are some strong signs that VGChartz is quite on the money. For example, Sony announced that they had sold through 1 million PS3s in Europe when VGChartz' tracker read .97 million.

When NPD, Media Create, or any other professional tracking firm has diverges from VGChartz' figures, Ioi (the site administrator) clearly tweaks his numbers to accomodate for this (for example, he tweaked the figures last week when the Canadian NPD totals came out).  

That's per month, Your Mother, not overall. At the end of the month, the numbers are adjusted to be more in line with actual sales, if that is necessary. I'd guess that VGChartz numbers are withing +-7 or +-8 percent overall. 

In that case, the numbers are even more accurate for my purposes! Good to know.

I'm actually quite surprised by the graph that was linked. I recognize that the 360 didn't actually hit ten million by the holiday, but I didn't realize it was performing as dismally as the PS3.

I think they are accurate. But its been selling well the past two weeks world wide. If it continues this trend from weeks on out selling at least 70k WW, Around 6 million units would have been sold from the luanch to next january. But I expect a huge jump in sales this holiday season for ps3 maybe even gettin as close as 10k units away from wii for weekly sales. And end up around 7- 8 million units sold with the 360 staying around 12-13 million and the wii high around 14million.

 Thats a matter of perspective.  Some will say that the 360 is expanding its market share (aka doing better than the Xbox) and say the PS3 is losing market share (doing worse than the PS2). I don't know if I completely buy in to that philosophy but there is some truth to it. In reality I think it is the Wii who is doing so good that makes for such doom and gloom forecasts for the other 2, whether that is a fair assessment is hard to say but I doubt anyone will tell you the PS3 is right where Sony wanted it to be.