Sony declares PS3 victory in Europe
Speaking at Sony’s PlayStation Day event yesterday, SCEE’s David Reeves revealed that the PS3 has now outsold Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in Europe. This means that the console – which once laboured under a difficult and delayed launch, a killer price tag and a practically non-existent games line-up – has passed a very important milestone.
“We have sold more PlayStation 3s throughout Europe than Xbox 360 even though they launched 16 months before us.” Reeves crowed, citing that more than 5 million hardware units had been sold and that the PS3 has been consistently outselling the 360 since October last year. And this comes in spite of the PS3 still having a much higher price tag than the 360.
However, it is little surprise to know that the PS3 isn’t really the console that’s dominating Europe and, well, basically everywhere else; that is, of course, the Nintendo Wii. Although the PS2 utterly dominated the previous generation, the PS3 doesn’t look like it will ever quite achieve the same heights.
If you’re a little sceptical about the figures, we don’t blame you. Certainly there’ll be a number of fanboys out there wanting to either brand them as outright lies or claim that they represent Sony’s eternal victory in console space.
For me, just thinking about it (a thought experiment if you will), it’s hard to see how these add up – the majority of my friends still have 360s. Of those that do have a PS3, 90% of us owned a 360 first, often right up until it broke. Sometimes we even bought more than one because the RRoD repair policy hadn’t been announced by then. Grrr. Annoying though it may be, surely that adds up to more sales?
Part of this can be explained by the fact that the PS3 has done better in the rest of Europe than in the UK, where the 360 has done markedly better. Games consultant Nick Parker blames this on the fact that Europe doesn’t go for consoles aimed squarely at traditional adult males. Although Microsoft made some effort to broaden its scope, it “never did come up with the goods” says Parker.
PlayStation 3 (via BBC)
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