Gamertell

Industry punching bag and Sony’s game chief executive, Kaz Harai, has set a corporate goal to sell 150 million PS3s. That’s 10 million more PS3s than the number of ridiculously ubiquitous PS2s sold (approx. 140 million) in its nine-year existence so far.

According to the BBC, the Playstation 2 had sold 50 million units worldwide two years after its US release. That’s 36 million more than the number of PS3s sold 22 months after its worldwide release. Sure, it’s two months shy of two years but there’s a very slim chance Sony can sell 4.5 million PS3s each week for the next eight weeks, even with the upcoming reduced-price system.

The market was a little easier for the PS2 in the sixth-generation era, reaching store shelves a year before the Xbox. For whatever reason (it’s hard for a former Sega fan-boy to talk about this), it quickly trounced the Dreamcast which had been building steam on the market since 1999. Nintendo’s GameCube proved a no-contest, selling only 20 million units by the end of its life cycle.

The PS3 has been more widely available and has even more name cachet than it did when it released the PS2 but Microsoft and Nintendo are proving far more competitive now than during the early oughts. As of April 2008, the Xbox 360 has sold 19 million unit and the Wii had sold nearly 25 million.

So, what gives? It’s the price, stupid. In a Financial Times report, Wall Street video games analyst Michael Pachter said, “It’s highly likely that when the PS3 gets below $200, it will sell as well as the PS2.”

Sony has already gone through a one-fourth price cut, mirroring the Playstation 2’s one-third drop to $200 in mid-2002 to compete with the Xbox. And that’s when the console had a 10-to-1 market share over the Xbox, according to this 2002 CNN report.

Two hundred dollars is a long way to fall and 150 million is a lot of units to move.

Read [Financial Times] Product Page [Sony]

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