A Tree Falling in the Forest

David Reeves, head of SCEE announced Sony's VE Day over Microsoft at the PlayStation Day event in London: "I am delighted to be able announce today that we have sold more PlayStation 3s throughout Europe than Xbox 360 - even though they launched sixteen months before PS3," The much anticipated announcement came a few months earlier than expected. Publishers have been eyeing the increased European sales for a few months and using words like "still born," "moribund" and "hit the wall" to describe 360's European performance. Apparently, David Reeves and the publishers didn't read Microsoft's announcement from one month earlier: Xbox 360 is the number one next-gen console in EMEA, owning 42% of the market in terms of life-to-date revenue. Xbox 360 continues to enjoy the highest software attach rate of any game console in Europe with more than 7.0 games sold per console (PS3: 3.8; Wii 3.5) after 27 months on the market. Microsoft...

The console war continues after three Christmases for Xbox and 2 for Wii and PS3. While Microsoft feigned a a claim of victory as first to 10 million units worldwide, their press conference is starting to look more and more like George Bush in front of a Mission Accomplished poster. Microsoft has a lot to be proud of, if we focus on the US. In the month of December, Xbox sold 1.26 million units to PS3's 798,000 in the US. They don't like to talk about Wii which sold 1.35 million. For the year, Xbox almost doubled PS3's sale with 4.62 to 2.56 million units. Wii beat them both with 6.29 million. You can see more in real time at the bottom of this blog. Unfortunately, and it may sound un-American, but we have to consider the rest of the world. Xbox never made it out of the gate in Japan and still fails to sell. In Europe, sales have been trailing PS3 since last summer. According to Sony, the PS3 installed base is already larger in France, Spain, Germany and Italy th...