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July NPDs Show PS3 Didn't Pull Ahead of 360
Despite last month's price drop, Sony's PlayStation 3 console just couldn't pull ahead of the Microsoft Xbox 360. Both, according to the latest NPD results, are still dwarfed by the continued domination of Nintendo's Wii console. 1up has the numbers for July: 'PlayStation 2 - 222k, PlayStation 3 - 159k, PSP - 214k, Xbox 360 - 170k, Wii - 425k, Nintendo DS - 405k, Game Boy Advance -- 87k.' For further commentary we can turn to Gamasutra, which offers a further breakdown on the numbers and some big picture perspective for this year: "Total industry revenue for 2007 presently stands at $7.0 billion. If there is no year-on-year growth for any month until the end of 2007, then the industry will finish the year with $14.5 billion in revenue, an increase in 16% over 2006. That's a reasonably pessimistic scenario ... If we start with our current $7.0 billion as of the end of July and continue at a rate of 40% growth through the end of the year, then we arrive at a total of $17.5 billion for all of 2007 ... If Wii supply constraints are eased, Halo 3 sells as well as expected, Sony's first-party software attracts more PS3 buyers, and Rock Band and Guitar Hero III are both hits, it seems likely that revenues may go above $18 billion. In this optimistic scenario, industry revenues during the single month of December 2007 would equal or surpass the total annual revenue from all of 1997."
This summary has some interesting spin.
To me there are really two interesting things that happened with recent sales numbers:
First: The Wii took the over the overall marketshare lead for this generation.
Second: The PS3 almost pulled even in July in the US, but pulled ahead of the 360 into second place by almost 2x if you take worldwide sales into account.
I'm assuming you've never played any of the other WarioWare games. They all play like that with the respective controllers of each system. It's nothing new to the Wii.
That the Wii outsold the DS. The DS has been the king in all territories for a long time now...
The PS3 was nearly even in sales for one month (July) which also saw a "price cut" (really a closeout price). Xbox 360 saw a price cut this month (an actual price cut, not a phasing out of a version of the console), so we'll have to wait and see what the August numbers look like. The 360 also had several big games this month (Bioshock and Madden08 -- say what you will about people buying the same game year over year, but Madden is a huge system seller), and the Halo 3 madness is already gearing up which should drive sales at least through the holiday season. The PS3's increase in sales was a fluke, nothing more.
Unfortunately we are talking about GAMES not movies. First, Blood Diamond is a poor example since the DD5.1 track is encoded at a pitful 640kbps. Compare a DD5.1 encoded at 1.5Mbs/sec and the difference is much less noticeable (if at all on the average speaker setup). Also, you mistake uncompressed for lossless. Uncompressed PCM can be lossy and take up more space than a lossless codec like TrueHD (which generally takes up a third the space). Think of it this way. Take a photograph and save it as a PNG image. That's 24-bit lossless. Save it as a 16-bit BMP. That's 16-bit uncompressed. It will have banding and look like ass compared to the PNG even though the PNG is smaller. Now save the PNG as a JPEG. It will be smaller still but you'll be hard-pressed to tell the difference (if you use quality settings) between it and the original. The 16-bit BMP will look like crap despite being uncompressed. Your PCM soundtrack on Blood Diamond is 16-bit uncompressed. Wouldn't you rather have a lossy 24-bit soundtrack? Of course you would. Now you could splurge and get a lossless 24-bit TrueHD (or DTS MA) soundtrack that is still smaller but better quality.
Now for games, remember that unless a pre-rendered movie is playing (and these are getting less common since they are so restrictive), the sound is mixed on-the-fly from hundreds of elements with positional information plus environmental effects to give the final output mix. This requires lots of horsepower and memory. This is where the PS3 actually falls behind the 360. As John Carmack noted, because of the memory architecture and Sony's rather bloated OS, the PS3 has about 100MB less RAM to work with. Guess where the sound elements need to reside before mixing- in RAM! Plus the 360 has dedicated sound hardware to do all that math for mixing audio while the PS3 must rely on the already overtaxed Cell. By overtaxed I mean most games make full use of the Cell to make up for the rather weak GPU in the PS3. Even if they do manage to squeeze more out of the Cell (by dumbing down the graphics), you really can't get around the lack of RAM. Uncompressed sounds (which you are so found of) take up lots of RAM. On the 360, you could in theory have a music game which uses 400MB for sounds alone- an impossible feat on the PS3.
Oh, and War Hawks, which many reviewers have praised as a big, huge, expansive must-have game for fall with awesome 7.1 sound, incredible sound effects and full score fits into 800MB because they didn't bother including bloated pre-rendered movies in the downloadable version. That wouldn't even tax a Dreamcast disc.