[The News Bot]

There was always going to be a large number of gamers eager to pick-up the much-delayed European PlayStation 3, which goes a long way to explaining the quantity of consoles Sony shifted in its opening weekend. But the tangible sense of anticlimax so evident amongst consumers and retail has been given substance by newly released [...]
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[mikeaitch]

Anybody surprised?

I wanted one before, but not now. £425 ? dodgy backwards compatibility?

I wonder how many of the quite large number sold are actually being used for BR. It was supposed to be the killer app that killed HD DVD...

[Max Payne]

I was looking to buy one for the BD playback, but the price is just crazy for a games machine. €630 here in Ireland. Too much considering the problems etc.

[steve36]

I was going to buy one mainly for BR but the region coding farce has appeared again so they can keep it.
At £350 in the near future it might be more tempting....

[sbowler]

£200 in line with other machines, may increase its popularity.

[Jonstone]

This is a total none story.

What was supposed to happen, were they supposed to sell 165,000 consoles in the second week too?

You can't say sales figures are poor by comparing them to the previous weeks record breaking sales that were made up of 2 months worth of pre-orders.

The only relevant question is whether 30,000 units sold in a week for a games console at the end of march is a reasonable amount or not and to me it sounds pretty good.

[greektony]

not for one that has only been out a week it doesnt!!

[Jonstone]

Originally Posted by greektony

not for one that has only been out a week it doesnt!!

But as has been asked in the PS3 forum when this very story was discussed, who buys in week 2?

Week one customers are generally those who have been waiting for the console for months and have pre-ordered.

Week two buyers are those that were either waiting to see what the console was like before ordering or people who have bought one after seeing it without any prior interest in it.

There is no way to draw any comparison between this launch and previous console launches because no other console launched with the quantities of the PS3 so there was no stock at all in week 2

These stories all seem to come back to one thing, for once a manufacturer actually waited to launch their product until they had the numbers to satisfy demand but rather than praise them for this, almost every area of the media, this forum included, seem determined to make out that it is not selling well because it hasn't sold out.

[DougalDC]

Originally Posted by mikeaitch

Anybody surprised?

I wanted one before, but not now. £425 ? dodgy backwards compatibility?

dodgy backwards compatibility? afaik, the percentage of pal ps1 & ps2 games compatible is above 80%, and from a back cataloge of about 3000 pal ps2 games, i'd say thats pretty good!

Originally Posted by steve36

I was going to buy one mainly for BR but the region coding farce has appeared again so they can keep it.

the region encoding sux bigtime, but its the movie companies that are enforcing that, so that they can suck as much money out of each region that they will tolerate. its not all doom & gloom though, so far i have seen quite a few region-free films out, even casino royal looked to be multi region, at least the copy in blockbuster was.

i cant see the launch as a bad thing, bigest console launch in history seems quite good to me, no wonder there is no-one left in week 2, the die-hards have theirs now, and the price will make the non-die-hards sit and watch a while before they make the plunge.

i have every faith in the ps3, it will take a while to reach the penitration level of the 360, but imo, it has soo much more potential, and it ooozes class and presentation. i would be carefull of the 1st generation of games though, as the devs are still learning what to do.

[Knyght_byte]

you can tell some shops are a little nervous though about the 'apparent' lack of interest.....

my local HMV had a sandwich board out front saying 'PS3 in stock get one while we have them' or words to similar effect.......

translation, we have a shedload and are not going to meet our expected target that head office set and we dont want them sniffing around considering staff cuts/bonus reductions/etc to get that missing profit back...

i think if you will use all its features the PS3 is a fantastic vfm item.....if you only want a console though its waaaaaay overpriced....and lets face it, whilst a number of people will buy it for its many other features, most people will be buying it to play games on.....the HD market isnt big enough yet for that to be a massive factor.....the DVD market was already reasonably well entrenched by the time PS2 got onboard and helped bring it to even more people......HD however is still a niche product to most people....

just wish they could magically turn some PS3's in to Wii's so i could play Zelda finally

[rooster-x]

Originally Posted by Knyght_byte

just wish they could magically turn some PS3's in to Wii's so i could play Zelda finally

You could do what I did and play it on the Gamecube!

[Mr.D]

They had staff in HMV Oxford Street wandering about approaching people ( mainly single 20-30s blokes) to try and tempt them to buy a PS3...on the release day....

make of that what you will

[Resonance]

Carphone Warehouse is giving away a free PS3 when you buy certain mobile phones. OK, so you do have to sign up for a rather high monthly tariff.

[barghest]

I'll only buy one when the price comes down. Stupidly overpriced.

[Layne RIP]

I think the price has been the biggest problem for this... ok it's got a blu-ray player... but most people who buy a games console, buy it for playing games, the Blu-Ray is a bonus... not (for me anyway) the main selling point, especially as i have a feeling that due to the higher price of equipment (compared to HD-DVD) Blu-Ray will lose the HD war.

If the PS3 continues to get low sales figures then hopefully Sony will get the message, and lower the price a bit.

[Overlord69]

I'll be sticking with my Xbox 360, the PS3 is ludicrously overpriced (which is the norm with SONY). Hopefully this is the kick in the that SONY need to be realistic about their products and their pricing.

With regards to the HD-DVD / Blu-Ray, I'd never buy a console for that. I'd always go for a separate dedicated player.

[tonymccandless]

Seems like almost an outbreak of reason here with people taking a pragmatic view. I agree though that price is way too high even for hardened PS supporters like myself with cash to spare.

I am sick though of all the knockers as Jonstone said. No company can win: Bring something out and not enough units and they are accused of deliberately throttling supply to force high prices. Bring it out with enough supply and its a flop !!!

A weird approach to me but it is just another example of the media not having anything else to write about and trying to make stories happen. Ask anyone who has been on the wrong end of one of their "exclusives".

As far as I am concerned I will wait until the price hits £299 and then go buy one. All the initial bugs should be ironed out and I can then have a good console plus a BR player to go with the X series Bravia.

Roll on the price drop.

[Jonstone]

The main point here in relation to the title of this thread is whether 30,000 units sold in week two of a major console release in march does represent poor sales.

If the Wii had never happened I am not sure people would be so damning of the sales performance of the PS3 so far.

The fact that one console has been an astonishing success, surprising most people including nintendo themselves, does not mean that another console has done badly.

A comparison between early sales figures of the PS3 and the 360 may well be a much more realistic comparison but that is impossible until you can judge it over a time period of equal availability.

So in 6 months time a comparison between PS3 sales over this period and the equivalent period of the 360's life will have some meaning, anything before that is pretty meaningless.

For me if the PS3 has a significantly higher sales rate over this period than the 360 did then it has been a very successful launch.

[Greg]

Originally Posted by Jonstone

A comparison between early sales figures of the PS3 and the 360 may well be a much more realistic comparison but that is impossible until you can judge it over a time period of equal availability.

So in 6 months time a comparison between PS3 sales over this period and the equivalent period of the 360's life will have some meaning, anything before that is pretty meaningless.

For me if the PS3 has a significantly higher sales rate over this period than the 360 did then it has been a very successful launch.

I mentioned this exact thing in one of the other many threads on the PS3 sales volumes. There is just no way to compare them so early due to wildly different availability of stocks.

[Nova Invicta]

Sony know this M/C will be around for the long haul and as LCD / Plasma screens increase in popularity particularly 1080P ones it will appeal to the class of people Bill Gates is after with the media centre idea. We bought a Wii before Christmas and Nintendo scored because it appeals to a different audiance than either the Xbox 360 / PS3 i.e. girls & older people are getting the Wii teenage men and adult men buy the Xbox 360 / PS3.
If the PS3 was a dud then the Xbox 360 would not be going through a re-vamp.
The biggest problem is thousands of people have PS2s, Xboxs and get fed up with the constant upgrades and the cost of new games.

[slartibartfast!]

The price is starting to drop. My local blockbuster video store is offering them for £399 .
It does state that this is a limited offer but it still points towards problems shifting units.

[Jonstone]

I don't know how well/badly the PS3 is actually doing, all i am saying is the figures quoted here are pretty meaningless.

For instance you could say 'Nintendos premier Wii release Zelda: Twilight Princess slashed in price by half indicates Wii is struggling' which would obviously be clear nonesense.

[roguejackal]

I have 360 and ps3 and I must admit iv been impressed with the ps3 so far .if they sort the online gaming out then i think its a definate winner, at the moment im just using it as a dvd player as its the cheapest way to blu-ray, and iv been impressed.

As for too high a price, put the 360 premium with the HD-DVD add on and you have a similar price but the ps3 has far more potential.

Another point when I was in GAME on saturday one bloke asked an assistant for some advise and he blatantly advised against the ps3. If microsoft are happy with there system and not worried by the ps3 why is there a new xbox360 coming out which is black 120gb hard drive an HDMI connection.

[Malone]

Originally Posted by roguejackal

I have 360 and ps3 and I must admit iv been impressed with the ps3 so far .if they sort the online gaming out then i think its a definate winner, at the moment im just using it as a dvd player as its the cheapest way to blu-ray, and iv been impressed.

As for too high a price, put the 360 premium with the HD-DVD add on and you have a similar price but the ps3 has far more potential.

Another point when I was in GAME on saturday one bloke asked an assistant for some advise and he blatantly advised against the ps3. If microsoft are happy with there system and not worried by the ps3 why is there a new xbox360 coming out which is black 120gb hard drive an HDMI connection.

No company should sit on its laurels, if Microsoft want to stay in the game then they, like all others need to continue offering new products. I personally believe Sony have hashed the online side of things considering the time they had to develop, hopefully 'Home' will address this.

Matt

[Raoul_Duke]

You can read into these figures any way you like but to me, there is a definate lack of buzz about the launch of the PS3. On launch day I could probably have walked into any store (which I did, Currys) and pick up a PS3 if I wanted one. I didn't.

I can't recall a similar situation with a games machine for a long time. I had a stroll into Currys on launch day just to get a look at one of the machines running in the flesh. There was no crowd of people hovering over it and the machine was running RR7, which I remember texting my mate after to say how average it looked (jaggy edges on the cars, just no wow factor at all) to me.

On to the Blu-Ray player, I remember quite vividly, the pre-launch period of the PS2. I was desperate to buy one of the new DVD players that were being released but should I wait for the PS2 with it's "built-in DVD" capabilities. I decided to opt for a Tosh stand-alone player and buy the PS2 when it came out also. I was glad I did because I never used the PS2 for DVD more than 2 or 3 times. It wasn't a patch on the player and felt clumsy to use.

One year on DVD players were as cheap as chips, I bought a multi region DVD-RW playing unit for my room for £25.

Blu-Ray players will no doubt be similar to the DVD players and DVD Recorders, high priced but dropping quickly to meet demand. It's a disc player at the end of the day, the components can't be that expensive once they are maqss produced. I will buy one then, I can wait this time.

As for the PS3, I'll buy one when it's £250-270 and has some games support, exactly like I did with the 360.

Regards
R.Duke

P.S. This is not a call to rabid PS3 fanboys to have a flame war to justify their expensive purchase, it is my opinion and theory on the low demand for PS3. I am not a 360 fanboy either, that machine although it has some awesome games is riddled with faults i.e low HDD disc capacity, poor HD-DVD player (again I'll wait for a cheap dual player), poor build quality, noisy fans, constant crashes & machine failures. Also, not a call to 360 fanboys.

<RANT OVER>

[mikeaitch]

Congratulations on not getting flamed

A well reasoned summary , to my mind. I certainly wasn't expecting so easy a task to get a PS3 on launch day. I don't have either yet..

[andrew markwort]

PS3 is likely to do less well because of the simple economic law of diminishing returns.

The original PS sold well because it was better by a large margin than earlier games consoles. PS2 was better (though not by as big a margin) but had the added bonuses of playing DVDs and being backwards compatible.

PS3 has better audio and visual output, but only if you've already bought in to the whole HD/home theatre idea. Plus, even if you have the equipment to benefit from it, the BR thing is still an unknown quantity (remember Betamax, etc). On top of which, I agree that HD is better than what's gone before, but no way is it the improvement in quality that e.g. going from VHS to DVD was. So yet again, diminishing returns.

And the final blow is that what are people going to play on the PS3? Basically, the same old games. There's nothing particularly innovative in the game play (not compared with e.g. the Wii).

So outside a hardcore of gaming afficianados and some rich kids with money to burn (not a dig at anyone on this thread, but let's face it, a lot of sales will have gone to this latter group of muppets), the PS3 isn't likely to be all that appealing, especially at its price.