More PS2's to be sold than PS3's in 2007 and 2008: report

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 03 January 2007 18:34

Your IT - Entertainment

Reports are emerging that despite the prediction that the PS3 will sell 75m units by 2010, the PS2 will still sell in the tens of millions over the next two years, continuing to outstrip the PS3, Wii and Xbox 360.

With well over 100m PS2 sold since their Japanese launch in 2000, and well over 10 million due to be sold by March this year alone, it’s no wonder that online reports and analysts are reporting that the PS2 will continue being the true winner of the console gaming crown, despite being a last-gen gaming console.

Plenty of games are still coming out for the PS2 as Sony capitalizes on its leadership position as the company with the largest number of games consoles out there. This, of course, helps the PSP too, which has been compared to a PS2 shrunken to fit into the confines of the cool PSP casing.

Even the rumoured PSP ‘2’ is likely to still sport the same processing power so the same library of games is available for both the PSP and the PSP ‘2’, with the major differences slated to be the inclusion of a 60Gb hard drive, with the possibility of built-in web cams, GPS positioning and possibly telephony features included as well.

So there’s much life left in the PS2 architecture, and Sony no doubt wants to squeeze out every drop of profit to make up for the loss making PS3, the Blu-ray technology and of course the massively expensive battery catastrophe of 2006 that saw huge recalls but only a handful of actual exploded batteries.

We’ll no doubt see plenty of PS3 games appear this year that really start to take advantage of the PS3’s power, and this will have an effect of the popularity of the PS2, especially as the price of the PS3 falls to more realistic levels. It is, after all, only to be expected that a games console will drop in price. They always have in the past, and there’s no reason to suspect they won’t again in the future.

Especially if the PS3 doesn’t start making some serious inroads into the number of Wii’s and Xbox 360’s sold. But with the PS2 available for less than AUD A$200, and not much more than US $100, for now, it’s the console that everyone has to beat. Even Sony, as they profit from the continuing success that is the Playstation 2.