Researchers Predict PS3 Will Overtake the Competition by 2011

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As we just reported, Sony’s PlayStation 3 led hardware sales in the month of January. According to research firm iSuppli, that trend is going to continue, with the PS3 becoming the market leader by 2011.

They expect the Wii to hold on to the top spot until the PS3 overtakes it, with the Xbox 360 seeing the least number of console sales from here on out. They predict the 360 will sell only 7.5 million units by the end of this year, while the PS3 will double its install base to over 20 million total.

The thing I find most surprising, and leads me to doubt these people, is that the 360 and Wii will somehow lose some installed base in 2011. How is that exactly? I don’t know if they assume the Wii’s and 360′s successors will be coming out and people will be trading up, or if they are just a bunch of idiots that assume Sony will win simply based on the past two generations. In other words, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

While I certainly believe the next-gen console race is far from over, I wouldn’t trust numbers like these from people who don’t do anything to explain how they came up with them. All research firms and analysts can only make “educated guesses”, but in this case, it doesn’t seem that iSuppli is very educated.

Feel free to agree with me in the comments section.

Source: International Business Times

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  • Ant

    only a stab in the dark, but..

    I can see them factoring in the Death of this generation in 2011.

    I read a stat somewhere the other day regarding Xbox declining, Gamecube declining, but PS2 still on the rise, albeit at a much slower rate.

    I even saw a commercial for a PS2 game tonight (not PS3)

    So, I can see it possible that this report factors in such trends..

    In 2011, Xbox & Wii will be 6 years old, and we may be replacing them with the 720 and the W00!. Playstation 4 may be out, including a Holographic display at 4 times the price, having a slow adoption rate while PS3 units still sell.

    of course I could also be totally wrong and they are either Sony fanboiz or crack-smokers =D

  • http://www.savetheinternet.com/ DavidGX

    Oh yes, another analyst prediction. We all know how accurate THOSE are…

  • Dan Landis

    Exactly. With so many analysts making so many predictions, one of them is bound to get it right just by chance. Of course, they will spew out the I-told-you-so’s and pretend they actually knew what they were talking about. This is why we just shouldn’t listen to any of them.

  • http://www.savetheinternet.com/ DavidGX

    I would’ve swore the PS3 was supposed to over take the 360 four or five times by now, if the previous predictions were correct.

    I wonder why they even waste their time? I could probably pull numbers out of my ass for a lot less money than these clowns do.

  • LC

    yeah maybe so dave… but then you’d spend all that money cleaning those shitty numbers. stick to your day job…

  • Patrick Steen

    How DID the Wii and 360 lose install base!? What’s up with that…that makes no sense.

  • Krispy Demon

    All these analysts are full of crap. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see Sony pulling out of this one completely, at least not in the current generation of consoles. I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom for the system or anything, I just don’t think they’re going to come back from the mistakes that they made in the begininning. I’m sure they’ll start to climb back up, similar to what the Xbox was doing at the end of it’s lifespan, but MS didn’t actually start “beating” Sony until this generation.

    Frankly though, I just don’t think Sony’s got enough going for it to get back up. Sony is going to have to pull some amazing rabbits out of their hat to not just change consumer opinions on their system, but developer and publisher opinion. Look at Call of Duty 4 sales on each system. It sold more than twice as many copies on the 360 as it did on the PS3, and that’s a blockbuster AAA title. The money’s just not there for some developers/publishers to bother with the system sometimes. It’s harder to develop for which means games cost more to make, and they don’t sell as well. I’ll put sixty-five dollars down right now that says GTAIV will have similar sales figures to CoD4 as far as the breakdown between systems. GTAIV is also a great example because it illustrates the extra time/money that it takes to develop for the system. GTAIV could have been out there already making people money but it’s not. It’s still costing money. If this wasn’t GTA IV and was something that wasn’t a sure fire trillion dollar blockbuster, do you think they’d still be working on it or would they have just pushed it out the door already?

    Think of it this way. Let’s just say Rockstar budgets fifty bucks a month to develop a game. Now, if they split that down the middle on the two systems and finish a game in two years, it would cost them 600 bucks to develop the game per system. Now, when it sells, they make ten dollars per game sold. Now, we’ll just use the numbers from CoD4′s January sales from the other article on this site and say that they sold 330 on the Xbox and 140 on the PS3. So they made $3,300 on the 360 and $1,400 on the PS3. Take out the development costs and they made $2,700 on Xbox and only $800 on the PS3! That’s a pretty substantial difference in profit right there. Now imagine if they got that same fifty bucks a month but ended up having to spend MORE to develop the game for the PS3 instead of spreading it out equally. It’s just not good business. I wish it didn’t come down to that but it does. This kind of thing right here is the only reason the original Xbox started making a headway against PS2 in the first place, it was easier and therefor cheaper to develop for. Developer/publishers could put a game on the xbox from the PS2 or at the same time and while it may not have sold as well on the Box, it might actually have had a better profit margin.

    It’s all a vicious cycle that is going to take hard work to pull out of and I honestly don’t think Sony is going to get back “on top” until the next generation of console is out. Of course, their chart doesn’t have the 720 or the WooHoo, so maybe that’s why the install base for the other systems goes down while the PS3 jumps up. New systems are out and Captain N and MS have cut off their last gen systems while Sony is still supporting theirs.

    I haven’t slept in a while, so sorry if this goes all over the place. I think my points are still valid though, even though I forget what they are.