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

The numbers

[MeanderingMind]

The last numbers reported on Japanese hardware sales: July 2nd - 8th

That would mean in the past 10 days, at least 24,129 PS3s were sold. That is approximately 16,890 PS3s last week, and 7,239 so far this week.

For comparison, the Wii was at 2,949,774 units sold the week before last. Given that they've been consistantly selled 70k+ per week, the Wii probably surpassed 3 million consoles last week. The Xbox 360 has yet to break 400k units.

Re:The numbers

[poot_rootbeer]

the simple fact that the 360's hardware is better suited for games

I don't know that this is justifiable as an opinion, much less a "simple fact".

It may be true that the 360's Xenon CPU may be more familiar to developers than the PS3's Cell, but I'm not sure that translates into being "better suited for games". There's no reason that a game written to take advantage of the Cell architecture could not be better than one written to take advantage of the Xenon.

Re:The numbers

[AuMatar]

The truely interesting thing to me on that list is the DS. The lifetime Japan sales of the DS are showing as 18M, and PS2 is 20M. If thats right, the DS is about to surpass the PS2 in number of units sold!

Re:The numbers

[MikeBabcock]

You overlook a big issue in Japan -- the PS3 is huge. Did I mention its pretty big? Or heavy? Or huge?

The Japanese have less space to work with in their living spaces and tend toward small slim and lightweight devices. The PS3 is none of the above. The DS which is selling well is portable and small. The Wii is also small.

Re:The numbers

[meringuoid]

The truely interesting thing to me on that list is the DS. The lifetime Japan sales of the DS are showing as 18M, and PS2 is 20M. If thats right, the DS is about to surpass the PS2 in number of units sold!

DS did that long ago. Look again at the chart: eighteen million is the figure for 'DSL', while lower down the chart you'll see that something called 'NDS' has sold 6.5 million.

Between the DS and DS Lite, Nintendo have shifted nearly 26 million in Japan. That's about one in five of the entire Japanese population.

Re:The numbers

[shoemilk]

Yeah, and a lot of people here use some no-name OS, Doors I think it's called? I dunno, anyway I asked once and they said it was made by some American company called macrosoft.

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.

Re:The numbers

[iainl]

Indeed. Codename of that '3x PowerPC on a single die' chip? Xenon. So you're both right.

No idea

[eln]

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? No, we have no idea why the PS3 is not selling well. There has certainly not been countless posts complaining about the price on any of our thrice-weekly PS3 vs. Wii vs. 360 Slashdot threads. None of us have any idea why this is happening, and it has caught us totally off guard. No one on Slashdot ever predicted that the PS3 would have a hard time selling, and there was certainly never any speculation that the price was too high.

This is all entirely new and interesting information. I'm sure we will have a lively and enlightening discussion where multiple new and logically sound theories based on solid economic and sociological data will be presented.

Yes

[rob1980]

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?

Playstation 2 launch price: ¥39,800
Playstation 3 launch price: ¥49,980 (basic), ¥59,980 (premium)

That might have had something to do with it.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

What is that Y with the lines through it?

Is ¥ anime for $?

reasons?

[Thanatos69]

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?

If this isn't a setup for a flame war, I don't know what is.

Re:reasons?

[thebonafortuna]

I'm a supporter! I think the Playstation 3 actually has wonderful potential to be the top notch gaming system in the next couple of years, once developers have learned to better utilize its hardware. It's price point is a turn off, sure, but that will come down...and developers will still be making games for it at that point.

That being said, although I really respect Nintendo for taking a different course and building a new, innovate gaming platform, I am frankly not very impressed with the end result. I wanted to love it, but after playing the Wii a couple of times, I have zero desire to ever go out and buy one. I think its great that games developed for the Wii probably won't be ports from other systems (in the future), because the control scheme is simply too different...I think its just going to take a while for developers to really make this new way of playing games work. That being said, the activity involved isn't a real selling point for me. While I can't speak for anyone else on Slashdot, I suspect I'm not alone when I say I get enough physical activity on my own for said activity to be required when I want to sit down and game.

Back to the PS3, well, I think the SIXAXIS controller is great. It is the perfect shape for utilizing motion sensing for driving or flying games, as you can "turn" it, rather than wave a wand to simulate a driving experience. I'm not knocking the Wii, I'm just stating that a rectangular controller isn't ideally suited for driving or flying simulators...although I'm sure it works well, or will work well in the future.

As a relative newcomer to Slashdot, I don't understand all the hatred out there for Sony. Whatever, I'm sure some of it is well founded, as there are many well informed members on here. I just don't have a real problem with Sony. I loved my PS1 and PS2, and most of my other Sony appliances have been great to me over the years (although I went with Sharp on my new HDTV purchase a week ago). In fact, I have always been surprised there aren't more rabid XBox haters on here, as Microsoft tends to get trashed a lot, for every conceivable reason.

Anyways, to readdress your point: I, for one, still support the PS3. I think it will do great things, and I hope for as much. Now I just have to buy one...something which won't happen for at least another year. But just because I don't have one doesn't mean I don't "support" the system. I might be alone, but there are probably one or two other people on here who feel the way I do.

Maybe...

[rbarreira]

Maybe the reason is that people only have one job? Those slackers...

shipped != sold

[sidb]

Sony typically reports the number of units shipped to retailers, not actually sold through to consumers. If there as many PS3s stacked in Best Buys in Japan as here, it may be a few more weeks (or possibly months) before a million PS3s are actually hooked up to Japanese TVs in people's homes.

Re:shipped != sold

[AndyG314]

Most companies report the number of shipped units rather than the number of units sold there are a few reasons for this: 1) Shipped is a bigger number, there is always a few more shipped than have actually been sold. 2) Shipped is way easer to estimate, as you know how many you have sent out the door, it's very difficult to get sales estimates from the countless different realtailers. 3) Shipped is good enough.

Re:shipped != sold

[badasscat]

Sony typically reports the number of units shipped to retailers, not actually sold through to consumers.

This is counting units sold, not shipped. Sony can report whatever number it wants, but there are third party organizations and companies devoted to counting units sold at retail, and Enterbrain (where this number is coming from) is one of them.

All manufacturers, not just Sony, count units shipped and announce those numbers. MS does the same (they just announced 11.6 million Xbox 360's shipped, not sold), as does Nintendo. It's all they know, after all - it's just an inventory. It takes a separate company to go out there and count units sold at retail, which Enterbrain, Media Create and at least one other company I'm forgetting right now do.

NPD does it in the United States.

Re:shipped != sold

[rlp]

As long as Wii manufacturing is not meeting demand, for Nintendo: shipped == sold.

HD TV is a big reason

[Kohath]

The PS2 worked on your old TV. The PS3 does too, but you might as well buy a PS2 if you're running on old TV -- or wait on consoles altogether and save your money for a new TV.

If there were as many HDTVs now as there were SDTVs when the PS2 was released, the PS3 would probably have sold as well as the PS2.

Re:HD TV is a big reason

[tzhuge]

"but you might as well buy a PS2 if you're running on old TV" That's really just not true. There's still worlds of difference between a PS3 on a SDTV and a PS2 on a SDTV. Certainly there are other things to recommend the PS2 (price and the huge games library), but this notion that this new crop of consoles isn't any better than the previous generation on SDTV is just plain false.

Re:HD TV is a big reason

[GeckoX]

It's not an exclusive argument though, but of course, this is /. so I must forgive the expected assumption that all is binary.

The PS2 had extra selling features that for those with a PS2 and a SDTV already, the PS3 just doesn't offer. The PS2 was the first DVD player for a LOT of people, and that worked with their SDTV as well.

Most people do NOT have HDTV's, so those people do not care about BluRay being a feature. People also tend to feel that they'd be missing out on the game experience if they were to play PS3 games on their SDTV...that does not insinuate at all that PS3 games wouldn't look better than PS2 games on an SDTV, of course not. It's just not a deal maker by any means.

Further, the massive existing PS2 base have large PS2 libraries at this point, and some of the best games to come out on the PS2 have come out recently or are coming out soon. It's not a dead horse, unlike the PS1 basically was when the PS2 came out.

Further, the game console market is much more saturated this time around than it was when the PS2 first came out.

Further, the must have PS3 games aren't there yet in the quantities required to really push adoption solely based on that front. It's coming, but we're still in the very initial uptake curve of a new console.

At this point, just about anything could happen in the future of the PS3 in terms of uptake and success, not all of which is in Sony's control.

Re:Slashdot groupthink?

[c_forq]

Because the PS3 is made by Sony, and the division in control of it has demonstrated extreme arrogance. The Slashdot Groupthink is strongly against arrogance, which is why it is so slanted against Microsoft, Sony, IBM at time, Sun at times, Apple at times (although the Apple fanbase here lessens the effect), and even Nintendo in the past. The Slashdot Groupthink loves the Wii because Nintendo is actually putting its money on what the Slashdot Groupthink has been saying for years (gameplay is more important than graphics, games should be fun, etc.). They care about units sold because publishers and developers care about units sold, and they want to see more games for their fun system and for Sony to eat its hubris.

Re:Slashdot groupthink?

[the_tsi]

We are at war with Sony. We have always been at war with Sony. 2+2=5.

Re:People aren't making enough to spend enough....

[VGPowerlord]

I don't know about in Japan, but in the US, it's not just more expensive, it's twice as (or 100% more) expensive as the PS and PS2 were at launch (PS: $299; PS2: $299; PS3: $599).

By comparison, the Wii launched for 25% more than the Game Cube, which itself launched at the same exact price as all of Nintendo's previous console systems (NES, SNES, N64, GC: $199; Wii: $249). The XBox 360 launched for 33% more than the XBox (XBox: $299; XBox 360: $399).

Seriously, though, the PS3 launched for $200 more than the already overpriced console that had been out for a year. That's seriously dumb.

599 reasons

[mapmaker]

Do you think there is a specific reason the PS3 isn't selling as well as the PlayStation 2 did?

No, there isn't a single specific reason. It's a combination of 599 reasons.

Re:Sony parallels nintendo

[Squarewav]

I suppose its a matter of opion. I personaly cant stand the spot the analog stick is, I find it hard to hold my thumb that far down for long periods of time esp after using a 360 or even gamecube controller. If the analog stick was ware the d-pad is and vice versa I would like it alot more. The dual shock was pritty much a hack to add analog sticks to the original ps1 controller w/o changing the button layout for older games.