It’s amazing the turnaround in response Sony is getting with the PS3 these days – especially when SCEA’s Sr. Corporate Communications director Patrick Seybold revealed 440,000 Playstation 3 consoles were sold to eager shoppers in the last month of November taking advantage of special holiday sales. Sony really had a good presence during Black Friday which fell within this week and accelerated sales greatly. Consumers jumped at the chance of any retailers offering PS3 bundles with several games or other accessories. I can only imagine the numbers Sony had for Cyber Monday as well, which many analysts have stated was a bigger draw for consumers then retail experienced during Black Friday.
Perhaps it would be advantageous for Sony to bundle games or include vouchers for free game downloads to maintain this momentum. Now is the time to build the army.
On another note, it’s interesting is that Sony didn’t offer word on that PSP sales looked like. Seybold merely stated,
“The 2009 holiday season got off to an amazing start for PlayStation, with all key retailers showing a significant increase for PS3, PSP and key holiday titles over Black Friday and the holiday weekend.”
Meanwhile, Nintendo announced that American consumers bought more than 1 million units of its Nintendo DS and DSi portable consoles during the week of the Thanksgiving holiday, along with more than half a million Wii consoles — for the week ending November 28th.
Rival Nintendo offered sales figures as well by stating more than 500,000 Wii’s were sold, as well as 1 million units of its Nintendo DS and DSi portable consoles were sold in the same period. Microsoft’s Director of Product Management Aaron Greenberg stated the company saw the Xbox 360 console move two times as many units over the holiday week as the previous one, making it the biggest sales week on the year so far. Some reports have lauded that Microsoft may not have met the same numbers that Sony and Nintendo did.
Very interesting, though – is it becoming more obvious that there is more value at this point and time (not discounting Natal, but it’s not here right now thanks) in a Sony and Nintendo console experience? I think the XBOX360 is a great value and has incredible community-driven features (including movie watching, social media, etc) and much more. However, I really think consumers are shifting to two things – motion control and simplicity in the Wii (as well as unique software IP’s), or HD gaming and movies with the PS3. The XBOX360 is a weird in-between of this. Maybe Natal will make it more relevant again, but if Microsoft doesn’t implement Blu-ray soon I think that sales will deteriorate faster than you think. Sure you can implement streaming 1080P, but Blu-ray games are also nice. Maybe Microsoft will do a power play and the next XBOX will have a humongous (1TB+) hard drive and you’ll just download everything.
