Sony PS3 sales vs Wii

Sony has pitched a claim that their sales are brisk and that it is hard for them to keep PS3's on the shelves.

But this is totally untrue. Many people have been writing comments on articles indicating that the PS3 is easy to find in stores where people have difficulty still in finding the Nintendo Wii.

Sony released information today that came out in articles like this one - which indicates that they have overproduced Sony PS3s compared to what has actually sold.


The article states pretty clearly that Sony has produced 5.5 million Playstation 3s and sold 3.6 million. So, nearly 1.9 million Sony PS3s sit on shelves or worse, distribution centers that have not sold.

They have indicated already that they don't make money on selling the console so the money invested by Sony in these devices is more than the $600 price tag. So, at a minimum Sony has $1,140,000,000 in PS3s that have not sold. Check that folks, 1 billion 140 million dollars with of PS3 gathering dust in warehouses and store shelves somewhere.

This isn't the kind of thing you hear from Nintendo, who apparently missed their mark for sales because they couldn't produce enough of their game console. This is bad too, but not like Sony.

A lot of the articles out there say this was a bad year for Sony, but that things are looking up. We'll see. One of the main problems with manufacturing is cost of storage if you produce too much when demand is down. Currently, I'm sure Sony is being optimistic and continuing to produce more PS3s. But they are already 1.9 million units in the hole, and the number of units on hand will only increase unless sales really goes up.

The problem with supply and demand in this case is that Sony's supply is really high, but demand doesn't really appear strong. Typically this would mean that Sony's prices would have to come down (significantly) to encourage sales; however, since they already don't make money on the consoles, they really can't lower the price any more without cutting significantly in to features or digging a deeper hole for each console sold.