Yeah this holiday season won't be good for the PS3 in US. I'm not so sure about EU. It looks (to me) like Sony is concentrating on March/April to make its move. The content will be there (Home, MSG, GTA .... ) a nice and big price cut is likely. Hopefully for Sony that it will not be to late by then.
Just saw that AU copies of Halo 3 CE came with foam padding inside the boxes, which prevented scratches to the discs. Why? I don't know. Either for international shipping or MS was aware of the packages problems? But where were the discs manufactured Mexico or China? (I thought I read it was one of those areas, not trying to be rude).
@Just_Ben, I really think MSFT's got it for the US market after this holiday season. The games SNE has been betting on to be console movers have been flops are non-factors (Lair, HS). The futures are already showing the Xbox 360 is going to hit it big this season, while the PS3 will not. Halo 3 appears to be the big game changer.
Can't be WW. Halo 3 is still not release outside of NA yet. Its coming soon but not yet.
And on the pre-oders. Aren't pre-orders (customers) counted on the first day a game sells (release date)? I remember to read something like that. Pre-orderd games are already paid, so purchased.
Also, their assumptions seem a bit iffy. For one thing, they're assuming that all 1.5 million pre-orders were purchased in 8 hours. I doubt that all pre-order customers got up early to go in and not all locations would be open early.
The source isn't that trustworthy for me, but still:
"Initial numbers for sale quantities of the Halo 3 video-game from Microsoft are coming in from a number of sources. The Xbox 360 exclusive title is said to have sold through 1.8 million copies during the first 8 hours of release. This quantity breaks down to about 1.5 million units sold through pre-orders, and additional 300,000 copies sold at impulse (without pre-order).
It is estimated (assuming this trend continues) that a total of 950,000 fresh units will be sold within the first 24 hours, bringing the grand total to 2.45 million units (950,000 + 1,500,000)."
I've read around and some people are exchanging their LE for regular editions, while Gamespot is opening regular editions and giving people those discs. Note that the regular edition discs have different labels. So it looks like we're going to have a lot of upset people whether they A) send the disc to MS, B) keep the scratched disc, C) return it and buy the regular edition, or D) receive a regular edition disc. And imagine if someone kept the disc and it stopped working when they're far into the campaign.
1
Yeah this holiday season won't be good for the PS3 in US. I'm not so sure about EU. It looks (to me) like Sony is concentrating on March/April to make its move. The content will be there (Home, MSG, GTA .... ) a nice and big price cut is likely. Hopefully for Sony that it will not be to late by then.