Sony PS3 Sales Slip, Not Surprisingly

Today CNN Money reports that sales of Sony’s PS3 have plum­meted 19% from last year’s fig­ures and the con­sole is lit­er­ally “dying on the shelves.”  Mean­while, Xbox 360’s 2008 sales have improved over 2007 and Nintendo’s Wii con­tin­ues to be a sell­out since its launch.

So why am I not surprised?

Huge Pric­etag

When it launched in Novem­ber 2006, the PS3 cost $500 for a 40G model, and $600 for a 60G model.  And that price only included one con­troller and no games.  Who could afford to spend that kind of money on a bare-bones video game con­sole?  Cer­tainly not me, and I’m a sin­gle adult in the 18–35 demo with a great job who loves video games–their tar­get mar­ket.  So I can’t even imag­ine how par­ents strug­gled to afford this price-bloated piece of plas­tic plus a $60 game game or two, try­ing to give their kid a merry Christmas.

But even though the console’s price has dropped sev­eral times and there’s now a wider range of mod­els to choose from, the still-pricey PS3 con­tin­ues to strug­gle.  If Sony’s con­sole sales hadn’t been dis­ap­point­ing since launch, I might chalk it up to the reces­sion, but that’s not easy to do when nearly every other game com­pany seems to be thriv­ing despite the economy’s cur­rent hard knocks.

Con­sole Competition

When it comes to video games, Sony is a rel­a­tive new­comer to the scene com­pared to Nin­tendo who has main­tained a huge fol­low­ing since the orig­i­nal NES ignited a love for video games in many of our hearts as kids in the 80s.  And over the years, Nin­tendo has always put out qual­ity sys­tems (I like to pre­tend Vir­tu­al­Boy never existed) with great libraries of games that have been fun and inno­v­a­tive.  The Wii, despite its silly name, was des­tined to be just as suc­cess­ful.  So why did Sony think it was a good idea to choose a launch date for PS3 so close to the Wii’s?  This is where I think they really under­es­ti­mated the competition.

The PS3 also launched at a time when the Xbox 360 had been out for a year already.  But Microsoft had been qui­etly bid­ing its time improv­ing the 360’s hard­ware, build­ing up a solid library of games, and win­ning play­ers over with its Xbox Live expe­ri­ence.  If Sony was expect­ing 360 own­ers to buy a PS3 as well, they cer­tainly didn’t have much of any­thing new to offer.  I’m will­ing to bet that most peo­ple who already owned 360s went out and bought Wiis instead.

Noth­ing New to Offer

Sure the PS3 has “amaz­ing graph­ics”, which has been its main sell­ing point.  But is that all that really mat­ters to gamers?  Sony’s sales have indi­cated oth­er­wise.  Other than improved graph­ics and offer­ing a Blu-Ray player at a time when most peo­ple didn’t even know what Blue-Ray was, what else did the PS3 offer?  Cer­tainly not an impres­sive library of games or inno­v­a­tive design over its pre­de­ces­sors.  Even the PS3’s con­troller design was more of the same.

Dis­ap­point­ing Game Library

The PS3 launched with a pretty under­whelm­ing selction of games that either nobody heard of, or titles that had already been out a long time on the 360.  Com­pare that to Nin­tendo Wii, whose launch titles included mega hits like The Leg­end of Zelda: Twi­light Princess and Metroid Prime 3: Cor­rup­tion.  Sony should have off­set the console’s huge pric­etag by at least offer­ing more com­pelling titles, espe­cially at launch.  If a con­sole has great games, gamers tend to over­look the price, no mat­ter how ridicu­lous.  After all, what good is a tech­no­log­i­cally supe­rior video game sys­tem if it doesn’t have good games?   Like many, instead of buy­ing a PS3, I waited to see if any titles would launch later on that com­pelled me enough to pur­chase this sys­tem.  Two years later, I’m still wait­ing.

It will be inter­est­ing to see what Sony does to try to win over gamers and dig itself out of its hole.  CNN sug­gests deep price discounts–that would cer­tainly help.  I guess.  My advice to Sony: count your losses and just focus on Playsta­tion 4.