PS3 back to haunt Wii in Japan
Zombies and Yakuza deliver March blow
New titles from Capcom and Sega helped Sony's Playstation 3 outsell the Nintendo Wii in Japan for the first time in 16 months, according Japanese magazine publisher Enterbrain.
Enterbrain, which publishes the gaming weekly Famitsu, said today that 146,948 PS3s were sold in March, compared to 99,335 Wiis and 43,172 Xbox 360s.
A jump in domestic PS3 sales was credited to the release of decidedly adult oriented Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 (Yakuza 3) from Sega Sammy and Biohazard 5 (Resident Evil 5) from Capcom. The games came in first and second respectively in game software sales for that period, thereby raising demand for the Sony console.
Despite PS3's dominance in March, Mizuho Investors Securities analyst Etsuko Tamura said the console is unlikely to topple the Wii's global dominance because most developers have focused development on the Wii due to its established user base, Reuters said.
The Japanese market has, meanwhile, historically been more accepting of the PS3 over the Microsoft-made Xbox 360 console. ®
COMMENTS
@Adam
You have no idea what you are talking about. There is no "down-mixing" going on with the PS3 Blu-Ray. That's just Microsoft FUD.
If anything the onboard decoding and sending decoded 7.1 uncompressed audio to your amp is a far superior solution to sending the encoded data and letting the amp deal with it.
The software in the PS3 has 1000x more processing power than a DSP solution in a amp, and the PS3 will always be upto date in it's decoding capabilities.
Clearly you are easilly fooled. I bet you also have gold plated optical leads and oxygen free speaker wire LOL...
The PS3 will easilly outsell the 360, the 360 is clearly at the end of it's lifecycle, the PS3 is just getting going. 21.3m PS3 sales in 2 years is considerably better than 28m 360 sales in 3 years....
What people forget...
...when throwing around total sales figures for the 360 and the PS3 is that the 360 had a head start of nearly one and a half years with no Wii or PS3 to compete with it.
PCs will win the consoles war!
"commoditisation of consoles- whereby they were all based on the one platform, were upgradeable, and both intercompatible and backwards compatible with each other and their predecessors. Product could be differentiated with add-ons, or customisations- allowing both companies but also end users to differentiate their products."
That's the PC gaming industry, where you choose either ATI/AMD or Nvidia, Dell or Asus, but will end up eventually be playing all games with either hardware!... Slap in a few dozen emulators, and you got all the generations back to second's (and almost inventor of this madness) ATARI 2600. I don't know if Odyssey was ever emulated.
Let's checklist that, shall we?
- one plafform - IBM PC compatible, (check)
- upgradeable - I am planning on upgrading my video card separately from everything else to play games (check)
- intercompatible and backwards compatible - that can be done with emulators, sometimes
new games are ported STRAIGHT to PC and Consoles. Need For Speed Underground 2, Halo, Half-Life 2 didn´t change a bit in both. (check)
- add-ons and customisations (CHECK, CHECK, add a few dozens CHECK here). Not just case mods here, the whole thing can be customized. You can paint your PC after your car, you can SHOVE IT in the dash of your car too.
Video-games BECAME computers (they've always been technically, but in a more narrow POV meaning). The few last bastions of differentiation - the cartridges and perhaps zero-waiting-loading-screens- were the last thing that told them apart (from my Point Of View. Now they are built from the same hardware, use the same media, (CDs) can use a slew of USB devices , can suck your broadband through Ethernet ports, making all this discussion moot.
For chrissakes, you can fool one of them into loading a LINUX core! That is a PC to me!
Correcting myself, VGs didn´t become computers, they've ALWAYS been computers (hello MSX fans!). They are just coming home, and merging back together, returning to their origins.
Remember 3DO, one of the first 32-bit VG's? As an option, you could buy a PCI card, and put it in your PC, and all the games would run from the PCs CD-ROM. The gamepads and joystick would be plugged in the back, and there you had it. Too bad it didn´t evolve.
A real winner (idea) today would be assembling all the main components of modern VGs in a single PCI-express Card and sell it as a game platform for PCs, if there was anybody insane enough to do it. All the additional hardware aboard the host machine could be used - or not - to upgrade the graphics/gameplay, that would be shown on its fair minimum settings with only the main PCI-E board.
I was just itching to say all that...
In a few years, all the VGs will just have merged back in Personal Computers, that's my bet. Wii is a winner for now, however.
haha fanboy
"Don't be so sure. PS3 will easilly catch and surpass the 360. "
Ah fanboy, i have a ps3/360/wii btw , do you know which one gets the most use?
.... the one with the newest purchased game! (currently the wii for trauma center: new blood)
With reguards to business the WII MIGHT be bearing saturation point , but i still think it has a little bit to go yet, but its been nearly 3 years which is probably about right for the console lifecycle.
The fact that the ps3 outsold the 360 in japan is a non story btw mr fanboy, anyone can see that the ps3 nearly always outsells the 360 in japan, only times that has changed have been when a japenese center game has come out for the 360 (the 360 is much more western console, and western games don't sell to well in japan)
"Have you seen the total lack of desirable exclusive games on the Xbox in 2009?"
No i see the total lack of desirable games full stop really, games i wanna play soon are star ocean, the new ratchet and clank, and.... well if it ever comes out , the tales games for 360 and wii. Heres what you should have said in your statement "Have you seen the total lack of exclusive games that i would desire on the Xbox in 2009?. Notice the difference , its all about opinion.
The ps3 is a ok console, its far too expensive for most people however, and don't go on "its a blue ray player", blue ray players will drop in price, and you need a hd screen to take advantage of it (even more money) but some people DON'T CARE that its a blu eray player, they want a games console (not to mention that the ps3 was behind in its media updates, xvid/divx support was upgraded on the 360 a few months before the ps3's, now which one i use to play videos simply depends on how lazy i am feeling :P )
Basically sony MIGHT be able to overtake the 360, but they would need one hell of a sales push to overtake the wii, something that msot marketing information would say isn't going to happen, as its already a couple of years into its lifespan , a price drop would cause a sales increase but how much? Not to mention that they need to do something fast or theres a chance of losing developer support, oh and they should nto annoy us UK people as much as well with stupid behaviour on releases and the playstation network!
Each to their own
I own both a PS3 and a Wii. I actually went and hunted out an original 40Gb with backwards PS2 compatability- and whacked a 320Gb SATA drive in it. We also have 2 DSi's in the house (thankyou Nintendo for having a half reasonable upgrade offer).
As per the comments above- the different consoles are incomparable. They may serve a similar function- but to different audiences and at different times.
The component cost of the PS3 is still falling- I picked up a Sony SATA bluray player for my PC last week from Aria for sixty quid....... The move to 45nm fabbing for the PowerPC chips- and the enabling of the 'dead' core will give a 20-30% increase in horsepower for the PS3, and a lower price point. I have loads of family and friends who have PS3s- specifically to play bluray disks- not for gaming at all- its an incredibly clever marketing ploy by Sony. They did the same with the PS2- at the time it was cheaper to buy the console than a stand alone DVD player (how times have changed!). Its marketing 101......
What I really would like to see is a commoditisation of consoles- whereby they were all based on the one platform, were upgradeable, and both intercompatible and backwards compatible with each other and their predecessors. Product could be differentiated with add-ons, or customisations- allowing both companies but also end users to differentiate their products. Its not quite Lapjack transfers that I have in mind- but you get what I mean. The alienware chasis sells as many units for Dell- as do its innards....... Think of it- a fully upgradeable console- that will play literally anything- and is a single port of call for product developers..... Cool!
I can dream on, I guess.
