February NPD - PS3 business is "hemorrhaging at retail," says Greenberg
Aaron "Green Machine" Greenberg has claimed that Sony's PlayStation 3 business is "hemorrhaging at retail," based on a 2 percent year-on-year drop in hardware sales, announced by NPD last night.
"You can't underestimate that we're half the price of the PS3 at a time when consumers were looking for great value," he told Gamasutra.
"The PS3 was down in February two percent even with the launch of Killzone 2 -- that's months of year-over-year declines. Xbox continues to head north while the PS3 is heading south. We're gaining share."
"But what we hear from our partners is that it's not just PS3, it's also PS2 down 62 percent year over year," he continued. "With that business declining, and with the PS3 business declining, it's been described to me as hemorrhaging at retail right now, and it just keeps getting worse.
"What we're finding in our research is that a large portion of the volume we're driving with Xbox 360 purchasers is actually PS2 owners choosing Xbox for the next generation. We're switching people from the PlayStation brand over to the Xbox brand."
PlayStation 3 sold 276,000 units in the US last month, the largest percentage increase of any hardware platform month-on-month.