James Delahunty
3 Jan 2007 3:06
With 103 million units sold by March 2006, the incredible success of the PlayStation 2 (PS2) console is expected to continue to leave the PlayStation 3 (PS3) behind right in to 2008. Even Sony itself has commented that the lifespan of a console is around 10 years. "The PS2 will have legs well into 2008," says Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles.
BusinessWeek reports on video game maker Square Enix Co. running advertisements in Japan for its new game Seiken Densetsu 4, or Legend of the Sacred Sword, which all end with a familiar PlayStation logo; but the game is made for the PS2 not the PS3. While you would expect developers to slow down advertisement for the older of the consoles, it is predicted that the PS2 will continue to leave behind all the new consoles during 2007.
"The PS2 probably has the capacity to sell more than any other gaming console," says Simon Jeffrey, chief operating officer at Sega of America. By the end of March this year, the PS2 is expected to have totaled a whopping 114 million sold so far. By the end of March, Sony estimates that 4 million PS3 units will be sold; a figure that has been marked down to account for the production problems and delays that marred the PS3 launch.
This trend is expected to be visible into early 2008 too. Rating agency Standard & Poor predicts by then that Sony will have shipped another 11 million PS2 units, but that the PS3 will only manage about 7 million. Of course, all of this is not surprising considering you can pick up a brand new PS2 for $130 and the console has a huge catalog of cheaper software to choose from.
Source:
Playfuls.com