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Sony PlayStation 3 Sells Worse than Nintendo GameCube in the U.S. – NPD.

Category: Multimedia

by Anton Shilov

[ 10/04/2007 | 11:25 AM ]

CORRECTION: Correcting life-to-date sales numbers, making other minor corrections.

Plagued by initial production issues, extremely high manufacturing costs and excessive retail price, PlayStation 3 from Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. is even less successful than heavily-criticized Nintendo GameCube. At least, in the first ten months of sales Nintendo GameCube was sold in larger quantities than Sony PS3.

According to data from NPD, based on the first ten months of availability, the troubled PlayStation 3 sold 22% less than the Nintendo GameCube for the same period, reports GamePro web-site. In the first ten months of availability about 2.12 million Nintendo GameCube were bought by end-users, whereas only 1.742 million Sony PlayStation 3 gaming machines were sold in from November ’06 to September ’07.

Nintendo GameCube was released in November 2001 and sold in 21.6 million quantity worldwide, below sales of Microsoft Xbox, which reached 24 million, and five times less compared to Sony PlayStation 2.

Sony PlayStation 3 is currently available at $599 in the U.S., the price-point that is widely considered to be too high. Despite of the fact that Sony’s PS3 comes with built-in Blu-ray drive and features high-quality graphics games, the price is believed to be one of the major factors that keep gamers away from PlayStation 3. By contrast, Nintendo’s GameCube could offer neither DVD playback, nor high-quality graphics, nor unique motion-sensitive game controller, like that of Nintendo Wii.

Sony PlayStation 3 console is based on the Cell processor developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the RSX graphics chip by Nvidia Corp., wireless network and Bluetooth connectivity and is equipped with Blu-ray optical disk drive. There are several versions of the consoles available around the world with 60GB or 80GB hard disk drives and variable compatibility with PlayStation 1/2 games. In the U.S. PlayStation 3 80GB is sold for $599, whereas the hard-to-find 60GB model retails for $499.