A Million PS3s Sold in Japan

Reuters is reporting that the PlayStation 3 has reached 1 million units sold in Japan. The article notes that the eight months the console took to reach this mark is roughly four times slower than it took the Wii. Of course, the 360 has only managed to eek out 420,705 units sold in a much longer timespan. To put things in perspective, an aging news report suggests that the PlayStation 2 sold 1 million units the first weekend it was released in Japan. Even the Wii didn't hit that, though that may have been an issue of supply rather than demand. Do you think there is a specific reason the PS3 isn't selling as well as the PlayStation 2 did, or is the market just a different place than it was 7 years ago?

Comments

Re:The numbers

[Zeussy]

that a game written to take advantage of the Cell architecture

Thats the problem right there. Sure there are going to be some developers that will write a game to take advantage (I am thinking good old dependable Square Enix), but will most common developers take the time to utilize it? The one thing Microsoft has some experience with is making software, and they know its hard, so they designed a console with quite a lot of power, but easy to develop for with a good toolset, therefore easier to utilise that power.

Sony has a machine with sheer power, but most of that is almost criptically locked up within the SPE's of the Cell, with completely different hardware and memory access systems to what a lot of programmers are used to. BUT I can also see this not really affecting the PS3 in the long run. With Game budgets now huge, complex and long. The tendicy now being to use License API's like Agieas Physx which has been adapted to run on the Cell SPE's and I can see more things like that happening. Games programmers can still program the General Purpose code for the game they are used too on the PowerPC part of the Cell, and the API's such as Physx, Havok and even things possibly like Unreal3's culling code could all be but on the workhorse of the Cell without the development teams having to worry about it too much.

It could (if not already with say Unreal3) that the teams don't really have to think about the underlying hardware of the platform they are working on, they just work withing the framework provided. Anyroad thats my 2 cents.