We all know by now that the PS3 had yet another terrible month in September, selling under 120,000 consoles in the US. But what I didn't know was that Sony have apparently spent the last week pleading with third party developers not to abandon their console.
As part of his look at the latest NPD sales figures
Dean Takahashi at The Mercury news explained:
One piece of news that came out this week was that Sony pleaded with third-party developers not to abandon its struggling platform. That change in attitude is a marked difference compared to the arrogance of past years. The argument is that the PS3 will show its strength as developers learn how to make games for it. But developers know they can staff four or five Wii teams with the same number of people it takes to make one PS3 game. We may have a glut of Wii games soon, but that’s not as bad as not having enough games on the PS3.
So is this signalling a new more humble approach from Sony? They have been accused of many things during this console generation, with arrogance amongst them. Maybe they are finally realising that if they don't start wooing those all important games developers they'll be left with an all encompassing powerful games consoles with no games available to play on it.
We recently learnt that Capcom had decided to
ditch development of Monster Hunter 3 on the PS3 and move it over to the Wii instead because it was too expensive, and it seems Sony are running scared of more developers jumping ship.
The full hardware sales figures for the month were as follows:
Xbox 360: 527,800
Wii: 501,000
Nintendo DS: 495,800
PlayStation Portable: 284,500
PlayStation 2: 215,000
PlayStation 3: 119,400
Game Boy Advance: 75,000
That surely can't be comfortable reading for Sony or it's legion of loyal fans. Yes there are some great games due out over the next year for the machine, but will it be too little too late?
The recent announcement of
a new 40gb model and lower price for the 80gb model should see
a slight sales surge in October and November, but will it be enough to catch up with the Xbox 360 and Wii?
There's no doubt that
the release of Halo 3 massively contributed to the sales of the Xbox 360, and unfortunately for Microsoft that doesn't happen every month, or even every year. But the Xbox 360 is still sitting pretty for now at least with you having to combine the sales of the
PSP, PS2 and PS3 to beat the sales of Microsoft's big hope. Sony clearly aren't happy.
source