one thing becomes apparent

there are not actually 28.5 million X360 owners ,,many of those consoles could be second buys of existing customers due to their console dying.

i hope game devs realise this and start using the ps3 as a lead platform rather than giving us ports that run at 0.01 FPS less than the 360

MS might just be getting too cocky....

this is fantastic

& we had articles a few weeks ago saying publishers are leaving PS3....WTH

just when things are getting better lol

The other aspect to this is that when PS3 games sell its more often in Europe where the Euro is still much stronger then the dollar. This means that a game in Europe is worth 1.3 or sometimes 1.4 games in America. That is why EA makes more on the PS3 then the 360 most of the time, even when the 360 in some cases sells more games. This is also true of PS3 games selling more in Japan, again strong yen=more money per sale for games in Japan where Sony is also strong. Given the US treasury has made several trillion dollars by printing money over the past few months, currency devaluation is almost certain to keep this trend of a weak dollar going.

The reason the range has narrowed significantly (besides PS3 and 360 user bases getting closer together) also relates to four other aspects.

1) sold PS3s are more likely to be in use then sold 360s. You can say "OMG fanboy don't bring up RROD!" but it remains true anyway. Now that the warranty period has passed on many 360s, if one 360 dies and someone buys another thats one 360 that shows in console sales but not in increased software. If someone's 360 dies and they DON'T buy another, then the loss of software sales is even more significant.

2) 360 games used to have an advantage in that they had gamerscore points while the PS3 version had nothing. With trophies this has changed, so there isn't really a reason to get the 360 version for achievements in a lot of cases now.

3) Free online. I used to play some games on the 360 when it was new and I had live gold, but since getting a better PC/PS3 I've just stopped paying for live and played whatever game I want to play on the other two systems. If you can play Call of Duty on either, why buy the copy for the console where it costs another 5-10 bucks a month to play online especially these days where every dollar counts?

4) between free online and trophies a lot of two system owners seem to be moving to buying games for the PS3 over the 360. This can be seen with games like GTA 4 where the sales per console are very high on the PS3 vs the number of PS3's in the wild. Such a high number would be almost impossible without a large number of dual or tri system owners (which are almost certainly not a small part of the video game buying population) choosing the PS3 version instead of the 360 version despite the promise of later DLC.

As more people get PS3s in addition to 360s and trophies become more wide spread it seems likely that this trend of dual system owners choosing the PS3 will continue and even accelerate. This idea is backed up by the increasing parity of game sales between the two systems even in North America where the 360 has a 2 to 1 install advantage (but almost never anything close to 2 to 1 game sales on multiplat games).


That said the only way the PS3 is pulling ahead on most multi plat games in the next year is if the PS3 drops to 299 ideally with a packaged game. It's just not going to pull ahead as long as the ratio of consoles in the wild isn't closer. Sony needs to entice more 360 owners to pick up a PS3.

They do seem to have reached a level of complacence that took Sony generations and 200+ million consoles sold to reach. Looking at the lack of games for 2009, I have to wonder if they're reckoning they can stay ahead on price point alone. Since they're supposedly not announcing anything at GDC, they'd better have one hell of an E3, else I'll probably be buying all my multiplats for the PS3.

Everything's moving according to plan...

Good, Good.

This is because the Ps3 become bigger

I think it is all but guaranteed that MS stays ahead because of the price differential, but what is the prize if they can't get third parties to give them exclusives.  I personally believe that MS is losing money on the consoles at their current pricing, and MS has limited its ability to produce first party exclusives.  They are much more reliant on third parties to differentiate their platform from the competition.  

Please compare sales from NA only. 60% of members on this site are from NA region. NPD is for USA sales only.

Look at the console sales graphs between the three consoles in NA region only. It looks like Wii and X360 are both pulling away from PS3 in NA region. Console sales are more important than game sales because increasing console install base is directly related to increasing game sales.

http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii&reg1=America&cons2=PS3&reg2=America&cons3=X360&reg3=America&start=39194&end=39887&weekly=1