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Sony's Harrison In No Rush to Lower PS3 Price
njkid1 passed on a link to a GameDaily interview they conducted at DICE with Phil Harrison, SCE WorldWide Studios President. Harrison stays mostly positive throughout the article, pointing out that the availability of consoles is a sign of a healthy supply chain. He denigrates rumble in controllers as a 'last generation' feature, and specifically discusses the company's decision-making process for lowering prices: "The PS3 technology, as with any of our platforms, starts off life at a high price and then we engineer cost out of it. And that process is an investment that you make to combine chips into a single chip or to reduce components or combine components and redesign things, and that investment is part of our planned R&D effort to reduce cost. At the appropriate time and when we can afford to, the business model of the industry is to pass those savings onto the consumer, but we're a long way away from doing that yet."
"Until then, you can make no conclusions about how the actual console is selling because retailers won't report this information fast enough!"
Erm, NPD (USA) and Media Create (Japan) keep close track of the sales of all major consoles, and as the PS3 has only been released in those territories, the statistics are comprehensive. Current stats:
November 2006:
Xbox 360 -- 511K
Wii -- 476K
PS3 -- 197K
December 2006:
Xbox 360 1.1 mm
Wii 604.2 K
PS3 490.7 K
January 2007:
Xbox 360 294k
Playstation 3 244k
Wii 436k
NPD also does Canada stats, but the PS3 has been the slowest selling console there as well (by far).
In short, I do believe there is reason for Sony to worry, but not to panic. Yet. This is a marathon, not a sprint, after all...