我要啦免费统计

Saturday, May 7, 2011

PS3 overtakes Xbox 360. Or does it? And will this trigger the next console war anyway?

Data from research firm Strategy Analytics suggests that PS3 has overtaken Xbox 360 in terms of global user base. What now?

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3: bigger than Xbox 360? Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty 

I'm a little late with this one, but the figures are worth mulling over. US research firm Strategy Analytics has claimed that the "active installed base" of the PS3 has overtaken that of the Xbox 360. x360key Apparently, Sony's machine reached 43.4 million at the end of 2010 compared to 42.9m for the Microsoft console.

Wait a minute, you're probably thinking, Steve Ballmer announced back in January that Xbox 360 sales had reached 50 million units, and he's not a man to get publicly over-excited. Oh and Sony claimed in February that the PS3 was on 47.9 million. So has someone's adding up let them down? Should there be a 'see me' written in red ink at the bottom of the Strategy Analytics report?

Not really. The key is in that awkward phrase 'active installed base'. According to a blog post on the research company's website: "Our ownership models apply assumptions about device retirement life cycles to console sales data on a regional and global basis." Which would appear to mean that these figures aren't based on raw sales data, they're based on some sort of algorithmic alchemy that seeks to determine how many of the consoles are being played with, and how many are gathering dust inside cupboards, or propping open annoying fire doors. That's surely the market statistical equivalent of trying to track down and quantify the Higgs boson particle, and I'm willing to bet Strategy Analytics do not have a Large Hadron Collider in their cellar. Though, of course, their maths could well be much more scrupulous than the phrase 'assumptions about device retirement' suggests.

Meanwhile, however, a separate report from games retailer GameStop put the European figures at 14.7 million PS3 units to 13.7 million Xbox 360s. In the US, though, it's the other way around, with Xbox leading with a user base of 25.4m compared to PS3's 15.4m. And of course, the Wii is way ahead, with a worldwide base of 75.5m.

I'm wondering where this leaves the 360...

Nintendo is almost certain to announce a Wii follow-up at this year's E3, which won't be ground-breaking in terms of bleeding edge tech specs and raw processing grunt (Nintendo hardware never really is), but will surely be more powerful than the current hardware generation. This means Microsoft will be supporting the oldest architecture in the marketplace. Even if its capabilities have been extended by the launch of Kinect, this is possibly not a desirable position for the corporation.

Microsoft has insisted that Xbox 360 will have a ten-year lifespan, but of course, that doesn't mean we won't get a follow-up until 2015. Sony supported PS2 well into the PS3 lifecycle (even if Microsoft dropped the original Xbox rather quickly in its haste to embrace the HD era) – if this generation has proven anything it's that multiple console skus can now exist in harmony because the gaming demographic has widened so massively.

But then image is important, and development staff are no doubt itching to get their hands on a fresh generation of games equipment. We're already seeing high profile insiders like Mark Rein fantasising over where the Xbox lineage may go next, and Microsoft's recent job ads asking for staff, "responsible for defining and delivering next-generation console architectures from conception through implementation" left little to the imagination.

Was there a plan in place for 2013? And with PS3 gaining ground, will that plan be hastily re-drawn? Whether we want a generational refresh or not, might statistics, however ambiguous, be pushing us in that direction?

No comments:

Post a Comment