Sony Continues the Pre-E3 Posturing

Scribbled on April 16th, 2009 by Jordan Lund
Filed in E3, Industry News, Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3

posturing You can tell E3 is approaching, as Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony continue to posture and make bold statements before the major event. Lately, Sony has confused a lot of people this week when they claimed that lower unit sales on the PS3 was actually better than higher unit sales on the Xbox 360.

So what does that mean? In what strange mathematical universe is 5.55 million bigger than 6.98 million? Well, it’s that whole notion of market penetration.

Sony is claiming that within the PS3 market Street Fighter IV reached more of their users than the 360 reached of THEIR users, which is true. 1 million units sold to 21.6 million potential customers. That’s a market penetration of 4.63%. On the 360 side, they sold 860,000 to a market of 29.68 million. That’s a market penetration of 2.9%.

The game Sony is playing is that of demographics. By virtue of it’s larger user base, the 360 is a more diverse platform, which means a teen angst fighting game isn’t going to find as many potential customers as it does on the testosterone fueled PS3.

So it’s kind of cherry picking on Sony’s part to choose Street Fighter IV as their example. I notice they don’t say anything about the following
games:

Grand Theft Auto IV
PS3 – 5.55m / 25.69% of market.
360 – 6.98m / 23.52% of market.

Fallout 3
PS3 – 1.37m / 6.34% of market.
360 – 2.27m / 7.65% of market.

Soul Calibur IV
PS3 – 0.97m / 4.49%
360 – 1.14m / 3.84%

Another fighting game reaches a slightly larger percentage of PS3 owners than 360 owners. Grand Theft Auto is more or less equal on both platforms and, arguably, the 2008 game of the year does a bit better on the 360.

But this is only for games that were released at the same time on both platforms. If you look at games where one platform has a significant lead time on the other the results are pretty skewed:

Bioshock
PS3 – 0.36m / 1.67%
360 – 2.16m / 7.28%

Lost Planet
PS3 – 0.41m / 1.9%
360 – 1.76m / 5.93%

Both of those titles were released on the 360 first and the PS3 much, much later. The same thing is true for the two titles that were released on the PS3 first:

Unreal Tournament III
PS3 – 0.56m / 2.59%
360 – 0.44m / 1.48%

Virtua Fighter 5
PS3 – 0.51m / 2.36%
360 – 0.20m / 0.67%

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