Sony: PS3 ranks swell by 1.2 million since Black Friday

If Sony is to make a comeback this year, it will need to make a huge splash at CES. That's exactly what it has in mind, and helping the company along is some positive news -- for a change -- about its star gaming platform.

In recent weeks, Sony has been working feverishly to convince consumers that its PlayStation 3 console has been on a comeback trail. The problem is, even though sales do appear to have picked up, its two main competitors -- Microsoft's Xbox 360 and the winner-and-still-champion Nintendo Wii -- are also on the rise.

This afternoon during the first wave of CES 2008 announcements, Sony tossed out some new sales numbers that started the parsing machines feverishly crunching away. What the company's numbers boil down to this time is this: In the 39-day period between Black Friday and the end of 2007, the PS3 is believed to have sold roughly 1.2 million units directly to consumers in North America.

The phraseology of this number is important, because at this time last year after the PS3's delayed premiere, Sony published projections of units sold in stores, some of which were actually sitting in trucks and not yet delivered to store shelves.

Last month, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer indicated to the press that PS3s appeared to be selling at a rate of 200,000 per week in the US, apparently excluding Canada. Today's North American figures presume PS3s are selling at a rate of about 215,000 per week. For the week after Thanksgiving, Microsoft boasted it had sold 310,000 Xbox 360 units in the US.

Nonetheless -- especially if NPD verifies these figures -- they would validate what many analysts last month anticipated to be a quadrupling of PS3 sales over the same period in 2006. The news came piggy-backed to a report saying PlayStation 2 sales also came in at an impressive 1.3 million units across the continent, still besting the PS3, while PlayStation Portable sales rose to 1.4 million, casting fresh doubt as to whether that venerable platform has peaked as some analysts had projected in 2006.