"7th gen is a huge wake-up call to Sony".

Sony clearly have been beaten by Wii this generation. Wii is outselling PS3 by more double this generation. PS3 is selling on par with X360. Sony took the consumers and its competitors for granted and are now paying the ultimate price with a drop in market share and huge losses on PS3.

PS3 still struggles to sell systems two years after its launch and it is over priced. PS3 needs to start selling more systems. It may sell more software and gain back a little market share. Until then eat humble pie Sony.

Wii will triple the PS3 install base when the console generation is over and done. Later on in a console generation exclusives mean nothing and the losing console becomes a bigger loser. History repeats itself but this time the market has been  reversed. Nintendo are now on top, Sony are on the bottom. MS remains in second place.

BTW: PS3 will never be a PS2 or even a PS1. 50 million console sales ltd is all PS3 will sell this generation. PS3 will never even overtake X360.

By: numonex

Anyway please provide your views/ feedback on the topic.

Sony took everything that was right about the PS2 and reversed it with the PS3. I guess all the $$$ made them completely irrational. Nintendo, you better watch out.

50m is still good and will probably make Sony happy enough. Really doubt Sony cares if they're third as much as you, they just want to maximize their profits. Sony did the same thing they did with the Ps2 they did with the Ps3, Ps2 didn't have great launch titles, was most expensive at launch, released a year later then competition, introduced dvd. They were just trying to recreate that and failed.

Do they make humble pie with apple? I like apple.

I dont know, PS3 is probably going to top 30m in Europe alone, and its still got the potential to hit 20m-25m or so in the Americas. Its never going to be the gravy train PS2 was, with 145m consoles shipped in total from 2000 to 2010 and 1.55b games or whatever shipped but PS3 might still move as many as 750m games depending on how high the hardware gets. I'd go 60m to 75m lifetime for PS3, with certain markets resembling DS vs. PSP in Japan late in the sales life of PS3 and Wii.

The problem for Sony is that Nintendo used to profit over a hundreds of millions to billion of dollars a year in the 1995-2004 period when they sold ~20-25m consoles + portables at their best and had publishers ship ~80m-130m games per year on their systems. Now, Nintendo sells ~60m consoles + portables per year, and has publishers ship 350m-400m games per year on its systems. The amount of content (games) shipped for Nintendo systems is higher than anything Sony ever achieved with its systems (mainly due to Sony never having a portable before 2004) and Nintendo achieves the record volume at higher margins, which just makes them more a more formidable foe than ever.

That "weak" Nintendo of 1995-2004 was able to come back and obliterate Sony's game-division profitablity records ($3b in a year vs. $1b or something), total software shipped for manufacturer records (~390m vs. 270m) and total videogame systems shipped in a year records (58m Wii & DS in the year ending March 2009, compared to 37m PS2 + PSP + PS3 in the year ending March 2008).

So the revitalized Nintendo now sells more content, earns more money, and sells more machines than Sony ever had, and its hard to imagine Sony pulling off a similar rebound in the global financial crisis when there margins were never as good as Nintendo's to begin with, mainly because Nintendo profits on hardware while Sony loses alot on hardware, at least initially.

The current Nintendo is the company rediscovering what it made so powerful in the first place

Meh, I've been seeing this same exact thread for three years now.

Personally, I think this one is the best.

It launched a year later than the DreamCast, which was never real competition. They also launched a year or more (depending on the region) ahead of the GameCube (the expected competition) and the XBox (which no one was sure would be successful). That allowed them to get their good games out just as the competition launched (with a similar delay in quality titles).

As for DVD, the difference is people wanted it, and its advantages over VHS were readily apparant. Much of the market still doesn't have a clue what BluRay is.

To me the biggest problem is going to come to next gens consoles (not neccessarily handhelds though).
All three (maybe more i.e SEGA or someone else) will almost certainly have to go the HD route next time around. MS and Sony have already taken the plunge, Nintendo hasn't. Will the shift to HD cause a change in Nintendos fortune simply due to development costs?

Simple, Sony will never be able to recapture their glory days on the PS1 and 2.

Even if Nintendo wasn't disrupting the industry, the company has focused too much on the core. They are not at a point where they can abandon it. Also, Sony is too late in the game in terms of software. Nintendo could survive because they had franchises people wanted. Sony does not. Most of the big games people anticipated were by 3rd parties.

When the PS3 was first announced with a $600 price tag, I knew they were shooting themselves in the foot. It's not that the PS3 isn't worth $600 (and its current respective price). It was that the price tag was not relatively consumer friendly as past and present consoles were priced. If there were anything to be called a "wake up call," it would be the price of the PS3.

Because of this, it forces SONY to push their 1st and 2nd party support stronger than they ever had, producing a wide range of quality titles. It also forces them to continue to improve the PSN which has come a long way since the PS3's launch. And what's also interesting is that the PS3 is still getting plenty of third party support with third party exclusives. SONY does not have the deep pockets such as Microsoft, and they do not have the profits earned by Nintendo. And with the smallest console userbase and being the most difficult console to program, third parties are still announcing and making exclusives for the PS3. So could it be plausible that in the long run since the launch of the PS3 (maybe now), SONY made the right decision of hardware choice? Third party developers are still heavily backing the PS3. Interesting indeed.

And it's pretty safe to say that the PS3 will not repeat the success of the PSOne and PS2 hardware sales and software selectionwise at least in the foreseeable future. But sadly, this goes for all current gen non-handheld consoles. The Wii has the hardware sales, but not the variety the PSOne/PS2 had, but that's the closest we'll come so far. Currently it's the DS/PSP combo that offers very similar variety and quality software that the PSOne/PS2 enjoyed.

But since this topic is in regards to SONY and the PS3, at the very least SONY is pushing a quality product with quality offerings. I personally think that the initial $600 price tag was a double edged sword. The price tag is the biggest deterrent for consumers to buy a PS3. In all probability, I see the PS3 remaining in third place. But quality hardware and strong support from all parties exclusive titles and multi-platform is what's been maintaining respectable demand for a third place console. The PS3 has a lot to offer to gamers, and I cannot see why this will not hold true in the foreseeable future. Because the PS3 can be maintained as a viable option that caters to gamers and continues to cater to gamers, it's a winner because it's doing its job as a gaming console.