Despite a disappointing year for the PlayStation 3 in 2007, its sales managed to keep climbing to the point where it is finally catching up with the Xbox 360. According to Bloomberg, it has outsold the Xbox 360 between January and May this year, with the PS3 and Xbox 360 selling 1.2 million and 1.12 million units respectively over the 5 months. According to the NPD Group, Sony's best month was May, where it sold 208,700 PS3's compared to 186,600 Xbox 360s. With new games and features exclusive to the PS3, including "Metal Gear Sold 4" and Blu-ray movie disc playback, this may be enough to keep the PS3 sales ahead of the Xbox 360 for another while.
Microsoft has recently reacted by tripling the hard disk capacity of its console to 60GB from early August in the US and Canada without a price change. To help clear out stocks of the current 20GB model, it has dropped this 20GB model to just $299 until its stock runs out. Sony has so far decided to keep its $399.99 price tag unchanged. According to the Signal Hill analyst Greenwald, Microsoft may also unveil a new game controller to allow more interactive game play to try taking on a similar move to Nintendo’s balance board.
As we mentioned before, Sony actually makes a loss for each PS3 console sold, but it makes many times that loss back in the revenue it generates from games, online purchases and the royalties it collects from 3rd party game developers. So the more consoles it sells the more people who will buy games to play on it. Even if a customer decides to only buy the PS3 as a budget Blu-ray disc player to strictly play movies on, for Sony who backs the Blu-ray format, it means one more person who has made the shift from DVD to Blu-ray.
A few likely reasons for PS3's sluggish start include its high initial price of $599, the quality of the games available at the time and severe shortages of the console during the 2006 holiday season. Without the price drop to $399 in November, chances are that it would not have done so well this year.
