PlayStation 3 Barely Eclipses Two-Thirds of Sales Goals

The December sales numbers from industry analyst firm NPD Group for game consoles have just come in, and they aren't pretty. Sony, beset by supply problems, reduced its initial August prediction of 2 million down to 750,000, and in the end didn't even make that - the company sold 490,700 units in the US in December, for a total of 687,300 since launch.

Of the season's new game consoles, Microsoft's Xbox 360 was the leader, with 1.1 million sold in December for a total of 4.5 million since launch, with Nintendo's Wii following with 604,200 in December and a total of 1.1 million since launch.

Microsoft's entertainment and devices division president Robbie Bach had claimed during Sunday's keynote address at CES that the company had sold 10.4 million consoles through December, but that number CORRECTION reflects a worldwide estimate of sales.

"I'm very excited about the progress we've made to become the leader in this next generation of gaming," stated Bach last Sunday. "We have sold through December 31 10.4 million consoles across 37...countries around the world. That's a half a million units ahead of our projections."

Even Sony's Playstation 2 sold more units than the beleaguered Playstation 3, with 1.4 million sold in December, NPD said.

Sony had said back in August it expected to sell a total of 6 million units by the end of this year, which even analysts back then thought was overly optimistic.

However in September 2005, analysts from Piper Jaffrey predicted that through 2008, Microsoft would sell 19.6 million Xbox 360 units - with 8.5 million sold in 2008 alone -- with the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution (which became the Wii) trailing at 15.5 million and 5 million units, respectively. So in a sense all three consoles are doing less well than predicted.

There was some good news for Sony in December sales figures, however - they were the #1 manufacturer of televisions.