The only reason it's sucking is because the price is so high, i gurantee if it was the same price as the Xbox it would be doing better.
PS3 is
cheap in Japan compared to here. About £130 cheaper to be precice. ;)
The trouble for Sony is that if sales don't pick up in the next few months, most of their 3rd party developers who were working on exclusives will start concentrating on the 360 and Wii, because they can't risk the entire future of their business on a console which is tanking to such an extraordinary level.
And if Sony don't have the "must have" exclusives such as GTA (which they've already lost it seems), Ridge Racer (which they've already semi-lost as RR6 on the 360 is actually better than RR7 on the PS3), Gran Turismo (which is rubbish anyway ;)), etc. then they have nothing to draw people to the console with as it just
isn't that much better than the 360 to justify the price.
If Blu-Ray takes off, that may save them. But both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray show no signs of taking off any time soon. If HD-DVD were to take the upper hand in the HD film stakes then basically Sony are fscked. They have thrown millions at Blu-Ray to ensure it succeeds (Have no doubts that this is one of the main objective of the PS3. They desperately want all those film companies paying them royalties for every HD film release ;)).
Sony are also making a loss on every single PS3 sold and relying on software sales to make up the difference. Unfortunately that old tactic (which to be fair is what Microsoft are doing too, except they're losing far less money than Sony per console sale) is not working so far.
In Japan the game sales figures up to easter showed a 1.35 attach rate (the amount of games sold per console sold) for PS3 (1,097,000 games sold), which is really bad news for Sony. To compare, the Wii attach rate for the same period was 2.30 (4,516,000 games sold), but Nintendo actually make a
profit on every console sold anyway/
I don't have comparitive figures for the US, but I do know that Microsoft announced a 5.7 attach rate for the 360 in the US back in March.
It's also telling that less than a month after launch people can wander into their local Argos (Bristol in this example) to see if any PS3s are in stock and see this kind of thing:
So Sony can't sell their console, Microsoft are ticking along nicely and Nintendo have had to bring another factory online to try and keep up with demand.
Game developers and publishers have to follow the trends in the industry, so if Sony don't attain critical mass with console sales they will stop developing for it, or at best PS3 versions will be an after-thought. Developers need to go where the largest installed user base is to make sure they sell enough to make money. That is exactly what happened to the GameCube. It did't sell enough consoles and the developers largely ignored it after a while. It would have died a lot sooner if Nintendo didn't produce as much first party games as they do.
Muttley
P.S. Sorry for hijacking your thread Ben. :D
