Tag Archives: 2008

NOA’s Reggie Fils-Aime has said that despite the decline in hardware sales for this year, software will prove to be huge this year and in 2010.

“The record year of 2008 is very difficult to overlap. I look at our performance and see it’s right on track with where we believed it would be,” Fils-Aime told Bloomberg. “Our read on the consumer is very strong. What we are seeing today is a strong momentum for hardware and software.

“Profitability in this industry is in software. The software peak in this industry should be this year and next year. This industry is cyclical in that a system’s sales peak in the third calendar year. The fact that we’ve seen a decline year on year is standard.”

Truly, 2008 was a banner year, and while it will be hard to top that in terms of sales – all those great games pushed into 2010 may just come close to doing it.

Thanks, GoNintendo.

Janco analyst Mike Hickey has given hardware sales estimates for the year, predicting a tie in the US for PS3 and Xbox 360 at 5 million units a piece, with Wii stealing the show with 8 million. Stealing the show, that is, apart from DS: Hickey expects Americans to buy another 8 million units of Nintendo’s handheld in 2008.

The main story here is PS3. While sales kicked in thanks to a price cut and a smattering of decent software towards the back of 2007, 2008 is likely to see a heavy price drop and the like of GT5, Killzone 2 and possibly FFXIII this Christmas. In a word, “boom”.

“We expect PS3 unit sales will perform exceedingly strong in CY08, due to a recently reduced price point, killer content coming into the channel (GTA), and Blu-ray currently having a decided edge in the high definition format war,” said Hickey. “We believe the slower relative adoption rate of Sony’s PS3 console was a reflection of an unfavorable retail price point ($600), lack of distinguishing content, highly competitive hardware options (Wii), and general value confusion over the console’s embedded Blu-ray player. Considering Sony has sold in excess of 120 million PS2 units globally, we anticipate the PS3 adoption rate could accelerate meaningfully in the coming years as the aforementioned issues are addressed and legacy PS2 players’ accelerate their transition to current gen.”

Full thing here.

According to this, Sony’s dropped it’s 07/08 PS3 hardware sales target from 11 million to 9.5 million, citing a slow start to the machine’s life-cycle as a reason. The news comes as part of the freshly released Q3 financial report.

“On the other hand, Sony said it was raising its PlayStation Portable sales target for the current business year to 13 million units from 10 million,” said the Reuters story.