PS3 predicted to dominate by 2010 but few believe it

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 03 January 2007 14:20

Your IT - Home IT

A new report predicts that Sony PlayStation 3 will be the clear nextgen consoles market leader by 2010 with 75 million consoles sold, selling more than Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii combined. However, a site that monitors sales of the three nextgen consoles in real time, as well as consumer sentiment shows that most consumers believe Wii will win the war, while PS3 is the least fancied.

According to a report from UK-based research firm Datamonitor, by 2010, Sony's PS3 is expected to have 'won' the console war, although not as securely as it did in the previous generation lifecycle. Datamonitor forecasts that around 75 million PS3 consoles will have been sold globally by the end of 2010, while Microsoft's Xbox 360 is expected to have sold around 40 million units, and Nintendo's Wii is predicted to have sold around 31 million.

However, the consumer sentiments on at least one nextgen consoles site predict a different outcome to the Datamonitor report titled "The transforming global video games market: the emergence of next generation gaming (Market Focus)."

The site NexGen Wars, which claims to track sales of the three nextgen consoles in real time, shows that only about 17% of visitors to the site believe that PS3 will win the war while nearly 54% think Wii will emerge victorious with 29% choosing Xbox 360.

According to NexGen Wars, just under 9.5 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold, more than 2.2 million Wii have been bought, while so far less than 860,000 PS3 units have moved off shelves.

In a synopsis of the Datamonitor report, the PS3 is not expected to dominate as much as its predecessor, the PS2, due to late launch issues in the PAL region and the early lead of the Xbox 360.