by Playfuls Staff |
3rd January 2007
If NPD Group’s preliminary estimates are true, then both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 missed their sales targets for last Christmas: 10 million Xbox 360 owners, 1 million PS3 owners respectively.[more]
NPD Group reported that preliminary estimates indicate Microsoft’s Xbox 360 as a winner of the consoles’ war in the US, with approximately 2 million units sold between November and December 2006. On second place came Nintendo Wii, with approximately 1.8 million pieces sold since its launch in November on the American territory. As expected, the biggest of them all- the PS3- came in third place, with an estimated number of 750,000 consoles having found their owners for the same period.
What is interesting is Wii’s performance: Nintendo managed to not only beat the hell out of Sony’s rival, but also to seriously compete with Microsoft’s product, which was already enjoying a strong momentum on the market.
Attributed to the Xbox 360's higher sales could be the lack of supply for both the Wii and PS3. Nintendo probably underestimated the high demand for its console, while Sony had well known manufacturing problems with the PS3 (the lack of Blu Ray diodes determined a downgrade for last year’s sales forecast). Now, however, the Wii is still near impossible to find on store shelves, while the PS3 is now easily accessible at many big box stores across the country. At any given point of time, there were more Xbox 360 consoles on store shelves than there were Wiis or PS3s available. This is one reason for which Microsoft decided to advertise its console with the slogan: “next-gen is here, now, everywhere”.
What is interesting to mention is that both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 have missed their previously announced targets for the end of 2006. Microsoft was confident in September (when it announced both the HD DVD external drive and the list of 110 HD games available for Japan) that they will sell around 10 million consoles in 2006, thanks to the strong sales of the Christmas shopping season. Back in July 2006, Microsoft had said it had shipped only 5 million Xbox 360s. 6 million consoles were sold in October, with more than 4 million subscribers to the Xbox Live online component at that time. The Redmond giant expected to have at least 6 million Xbox Live subscribers by December 31, 2006.
As for Sony, the Japanese electronics has repeatedly downgraded its market presence and it eventually announced that it hoped for at least 1 million PS3 consoles on the market by the end of last year (from the previous 4 million announced in March 2006). Plagued by costly manufacturing problems, huge losses and lack of interest from gamers because of poor software package, the PS3 became the loser of the consoles’ war, from the initial winner-status.
For both Xbox 360 and PS3 it seems sales targets have been compromised, with a big plus for Xbox 360 though. According to
http://nexgenwars.com/ the top selling next-generation console in 2006 was of course the Xbox 360, with 9,476,155 pieces sold, followed by the Wii, with 2,232,916 pieces and the PS3 with 859,887. Clearly, Sony missed its target if we were to believe these numbers. Microsoft almost reached it. But until we have official confirmation from the two companies, we should take the news with a grain of salt…
