During Sony's recent financial statement, they announced that they've sold almost 4.5 million PlayStation 3s worldwide. Something to note is that they've changed their policy of stating how many systems shipped and are now actually abiding by the industry standard of saying how many systems have actually sold. This helps provide a clearer view of the PS3's success and is a much appreciated change from their past financial statements. Onto the numbers themselves, the 4.5 million sell-through is nothing to be scoffed at and shows that they are keeping pace with the overall number of 360s sold during the same post-launch time frame. Unfortunately, the numbers aren't great -- especially when you consider that only 700,000 PS3s sold during the entire first quarter of the year, a huge decrease from the initial sell-rate. Of course, the decrease in sales makes sense considering there were almost NO GAMES RELEASED during that time frame. Funny how people don't buy consoles when there is nothing worth playing on it.
Regardless, Sony feels that the one-two punch of the PS3 price-cut combined with a plethora of high-profile titles coming out in the coming months will help propel sales of the system. Their goal is to have another 10 million PS3s sold by March 08, which would put it about 50% above where the 360 was at the same time (~15 million units sold vs ~10 million). While this is an optimistic goal, we can't help but feel some of their excitement. Games like Heavenly Sword, Lair and MGS 4 (just to name a few) have been making gamers salivate like Pavlov's puppies and the sales spike post-price cut shows that people really want a PS3, they just don't want to sell a kidney to get one.
