Move sells 1.5m in Europe
Sony to increase production of motion controller; expects to beat 15m PS3 sales target for full year
PlayStation 3 motion controller Move has sold around 1.5 million units in Europe, according to Sony's Andrew House.
Speaking to Bloomberg, the head of Sony Europe said the company was looking to increase production of the controller, which launched in the region on September 19.
Move has seen "very significant sales in the first month since launch, somewhere in the region of 1.5 million units for the new controller across just Europe," according to House.
"The initial sales response has been so far in excess of our initial plan that we'll probably be looking at accelerating production."
He also said that Sony is expecting to beat worldwide sales targets of 15 million PlayStation 3 units for the full year, despite the slow down in the overall market.
"Sales have been significantly up year-on-year in a market that has been overall slightly down," offered House.
"We have lots of confidence in our ability to hit our profitability target this year," he added. "But currency movements present significant challenges" he said, referring to the appreciation of the yen.
I will be interested to see how seriously Sony support it with core software, both exclusively and as a control option. It'll definitely be interesting to see how fluidly it fits in with Socom 4, Killzone 3 and so on.
Although, the technology is slightly different from Wii, the core difference between Wii and Move is the content (therefore, its market), which Sony can now broaden much to the markets of Nintendo. I'd like to know if Sony will try to reach casual consumers with this intuitive type of controller. I don't think Sony will lose its positioning in trade off for bigger slice, but it seems very tempting.
They probably won't even introduce high price premiums for Move games, financially they are doing much better than Nintendo.
At the same time, it'll be very interesting on how Nintendo will respond to Microsoft. They got to come up with something new, and much better than 3DS, if they don't want to lose their share of the market.
I can't say I agree with this at all. If you look at their fiscal and quarterly financial records, Nintendo is still making incredible money. The loses Nintendo took last quarter were a $740 million currency exchange write off. They do that every few years to rebalance their holdings. Remove the currency write off and they would have had about $490 million net income. Unfortunately, most media outlets failed to point all that out in their reports.
I don't see them losing too much to Kinect either. You have cost of console plus cost of Kinect plus unknown sales capability. With the Wii you have Nintendo software, lower hardware costs and a known track record. Nintendo could do a price cut, some new console colors, big bundles and be done with it.
I'm probably wrong, I've built my conclusions on Yahoo.Finance figures, which are probably even less precise than the most media outlets.
However, I tried to use comparative numbers - and it is 25% loss of revenue growth (which doesn't include currency exchange write offs), they are encountering. I see this being problem: if Nintendo's losing a booming market in revenues, someone's got to take it over. Will that be Microsoft?
Please, correct me, if I used the wrong figures, it's here: [link url=http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=NTDOY.PK+Key+Statistics
]http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=NTDOY.PK...[/link]