MikeB said:
Yes, this from a marathon perspective. I think the PS3 will surely beat the XBox 360 for the long run. The PS3 already outperformed the XBox 360 taking equal time frames despite additional headstarts for the 360 taking equal timeframes ranging from a couple extra months for PAL regions (two holiday seasons vs four for the 360) up to even years for some regions and at a much higher entry pricing throughout this period.
22.73 million PS3s vs 19 million XBox 360s. Not bad considering the PS3 did not receive any official price cuts in 2008 and 2009 so far, despite never ending rumours (bad for sales). Sadly a strong yen and weak global economy prevented this.
People here called me crazy to think we will see a slimline PS3 by 2009 a year or so ago, I still think that's the case and this will come with an overdue cut on entry pricing (being able to attract more teen and pre-teen gamers).
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But the issue with this thinking is it assumes the PS3 sales will follow the same slope as the 360 sales and continue to widden the gap with aligned launches, but if we look at the graph with weekly sales we see this is not the case:
http://vgchartz.com/hwlaunch.php?cons1=Wii®1=All&cons2=PS3®2=All&cons3=X360®3=All&weeks=156&weekly=1
We have already seen that though it may have out performed 360's first 2.5 years in total it did not do it by consistently selling better then the 360 did over that aligned time period. If you look PS3 outsold 360 the first 20 months then began lagging behind consistently and the gap began to shrink. A particularly telling statistic is the PS3s third Christmas failed to outsell the 360's and was lower then it's own second. So what we actually see from the aligned launches graph with weekly sales is an early peak for the PS3 followed by a gradual decline. Compare that to a 360 that has shown consistent, if unremarkable, growth YoY in the face of increased competition and the aligned launches with weekly sales seems to paint a poorer picture of the PS3 future then the simple total sales implies.
Now you can claim that the 360's success the 3rd holiday is simply a spike due to the price cut and Halo and I can say that the first years success for the PS3 was purely on brand and pent up demand, but we will not know until we get more data. But I think it is fair to say it is not a clear conclusion from the graph the the PS3 is on a winning path even for the long term, in fact taking the graph on it's own it would seem to say the opposite.
I would also like to reiterate what several people have said, using aligned launches needs to be done with care. Though all consoles go through similar stages from launch as they mature you cannot look at them in a void. For example 360 was competing with a still very strong PS2 when it launched while the PS3 is going to be hit harder earlier in it's life cycle by the bad economy, these two factors alone make it very difficult to make definitive conclusions in either direction from the aligned launches, and there are many more factors at play.
