Sony’s chief financial officer, Nobuyuki Oneda, has somehow managed to find a silver lining in the news that sales figures in the three-month run up to June were weaker than expected. "Sales of the PS3 have risen but we booked losses due to our strategic decision to price it below the (production) cost," he explained, adding "Actually, because the number of units sold was not as high as we hoped, the loss was better than our original expectation,".

Umm, okay. Not the most conventional way of breaking it to investors and shareholders that Sony’s premium priced games console is struggling to beat back competition from Nintendo and Microsoft. In the same three month period, Sony has reported that its game division made an operating loss of 29.2 billion yen (roughly £121 million) mostly due to Sony reducing the price of the console in North America and Japan to encourage stronger sales.

Oneda also concedes that this "sales figure was somewhat weaker than our target but we still believe that the main battle is still ahead of us," and anticipates that the upcoming Christmas period will make or break the console.

Sony does seem to have prepared itself well for this make-or-break period – there’s a raft of new titles coming out over the next couple of months which, if they turn out to be as promising as they currently look, could give Sony the edge it needs. Games like Lair, Heavenly Sword, GTA IV, Warhawk and Assassin’s Creed are definitely much more exciting than what we’ve seen so far on the console. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that two of these are cross platformers (one of which Microsoft already has a clear edge on) and the PS3’s closest rival, the Xbox 360, is bringing its own mega-franchise, Halo 3, into the equation.

Christmas may prove to be a very fraught time for Sony, but the good part for consumers is that such hard fought rivalry should mean a higher quantity of better quality titles for us. And then there are the constant rumours of further price drops to keep our fingers crossed for as well.

Source
NextGen.biz via Yahoo

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