Sony's Story

Sony has to be disappointed with the first full year of PlayStation 3 sales. While PlayStation 3 sales in December 2007 were up 62% from the same month last year, that single data point misses the entire first half of the year when sales stayed under 100,000 systems for three full months. In fact in April 2007, Nintendo sold more Game Boy Advance systems than Sony sold PlayStation 3 consoles.

By July 2007, Sony made its first truly aggressive move to improve its fortunes: it adjusted its pricing. The 60Gb PlayStation 3 dropped in price from $600 to $500 and Sony introduced a new model, the 80Gb PlayStation 3, at the higher $600 price. Then in October Sony announced a true price drop, bringing the 80Gb down to $500 and launching a 40Gb PlayStation 3 at $400. While the newest model is more competitively priced, Sony cut PlayStation 2 compatibility to reach that point.

In retrospect, the PlayStation 2 deserves more time than this column has devoted to it in the past months. Whereas the PlayStation 3 sold over 2.5 million systems during 2007, its older sibling sold nearly 4 million systems. Simply put, a $130 system with a huge library of entertaining software continues to remain irresistible to the American consumer.




Sony appears to understand this and is laying the groundwork for yet another year of robust PlayStation 2 sales. When top-of-the-line PSP software is ported to the PlayStation 2 some take it as a weakness of the PSP – and there is some grain of truth to that – but it is really more of a statement of the impressive strength of Sony's older console. Sony has sold more than 41 million PlayStation 2 systems in the United States alone, and a quick and effective port of any big name PSP game is nearly guaranteed to earn a profit. It's difficult to see Sony passing up the opportunity to drop the system price to $100, hit the market with budget priced PSP port, and give the system one more year before putting it out to pasture. After all, Madden NFL 2008 for the PlayStation 2 was still one of the top 10 best-selling games of the past year.