Play Station 3 faces dark times

Oct 3, 2006 09:47 GMT  ·  By

Nintendo was good, Sony was bad, so it seems Santa' will bring more presents to the first one. After a recent survey of retailers made by the Japanese Enterbrain, the results can give you a taste of the bitter future of the PS3, at least in Japan.

On the question "Which new console will sell better this holiday season?, PS3 got 11% and Wii 88%. The second question was "Including all hardware, which system will generate the most sales?" The results, again, are clear as daylight: 60.7% Nintendo DS, 32.8% Nintendi Wii, 3.3% PS2, 1.6% PS3 and 1.6% X-Box 360.

The Wii was born after one Nintendo engineer wondered if advances in technology could be used in a different way. The Wii was designed to take processor technology improvements and use them to make the unit run with less heat, by making the chips smaller. This enabled features that other consoles couldn't duplicate, such as the ability to leave the console powered on all the time.

Users however, seem to have a different view on the matter, as one of them said "I don't like the Wii so much. Seems Nintendo is way too focused on family and local gameplay. This is great and all when you are a kid or in high school, to play games with some friends everyday after school, but pointless for us older folks, who only have time to get their interactive gaming done online. When I was a kid, I owned all the Nintendo systems. I think the Wii will be the first I don't own. Nintendo is just stuck in the past and refuses to get decent online gaming going like X-Box and PS3".

In the end, if we do some thinking, we see that Wii will win. Even if it's just because the parents will buy the Wii for "the younger folk" as a Christmas present. In the meantime, X-Box 360 has launched in South Africa, and it really doesn't matter what time of the year is there when you are doing a launch.