http://play.tm/story/12089

"at the end of Q1 worldwide sales of the next-gen system (PS3) stand at 4.48 million units. "

Are they talking about sold to Customers? and when did Q1 end for Sony?

I believe that the numbers on the front page for NA are accurate, I also believe that the numbers for Japan are accurate, so this 590,000 console discrenpency would have to come from "Others", if that's true then more consoles have been sold in "Others" then NA.. Which I don't think is possible considering the lead NA had over Europe

None of this makes sense...

That's because Sonys financial report means sold to shops, not to consumers.

Sonys sold 4.48 million units to shops as of the end of Q1 2007.

The 5.5 million that they shipped before meant how many had been manufactured.

Yeah, now Sony counts consoles further in the sales process, resulting in smaller numbers. But still, they're not counting the consoles sold to consumers, since it's impossible (that's why there are people working on estimating that, like NPD, MediaCreate, Enterbrain, VGChartz...).

I'm really getting fed up with these threads about this Sony selling 4.28 million units....its nonsense and should be addressed to shut everyone up about it.....4.28 million units have been sold to retailers...thats it not to people like me..who walk into the game store to buy them...4.28 million units have been sold to retailers!!!!

Well ,this would be a typical case of shipped vs sold.....if Sony hadnt explicitly said it was sold to consumers .

http://www.playfrance.com/news-infos-4-5-millions-de-playstation-3-vendues-dans-le-monde-325657.html

After all its only a 300K worlwide discrepancy and the PAL numbers have some adjustement to be made (194K in Spain instead of 140K etc )

By the way ,Sony ,in addition to their internal data ,have all the information of NPD ,Media Create ,GFK ,Gamecharts etc ....its their business after all .

I personally think the number must be around 4 million .....but we dont know how it is selling the thing in markets as Rusia ,Corea ,India ,etc ....maybe that and some tuning of the PAL numbers can explain a 200K worldwide difference..

my french isn't very good but I don't see the word "consumers" in that article.

It says "recorded sales", their sales are to retailers, why is this so hard to understand for everyone? Sony just switched to the same system MS and Nintendo have always been using, sold = sold to retailers in all their financial reports. Wait, do you think that the numbers should really be 12 million for MS too? Does that mean they sold 2 million more in Europe than we have now? MS owns Europe!

Actually...

"Le japonais précise qu'il s'agit bien d'unités vendues et non distribuées dans le monde. "

My French is not great but I think it means "The japanese said specifically that it's sold units and not distributed in the world".

And I did find some Portuguese news saying the same thing.I wonder if this is some misconception due to the change of units shipped from factories to units shipped to retailers?

@Gebx,

The simplest way to explain this is that if you read the Sony financial reports it is clear what they meant. I think the problem here is a bit of a language barrier with the article Diomedes1976 linked and the fact that some of these news outlets are not reading closely like they should.

Due to the way the press operates they are primed to repeat false information when nobody corrects them (in this case I doubt anyone writing either of these articles cared how correct it was). Please trust the mods that they know what they are doing...or in this case you can just read the Sony financial report and see what is said for yourself =)

What these really boils down to is a way for Sony's numbers not to look so bad because of how they handled the last quarter. This is not the same as saying Sony is doing bad, all it is saying is they did a lot of production in the last quarter for this quarter, so in order to "shift" some of those produced units from last quarter to this quarter they changed to tracking sold to retailer.

I think I am going to make a graphic....

PS - I hope that i have it right lol