Does the PS3 outselling the 360 change anything?

By now, most people interested in this sort of thing will have noticed the news that the PS3 seems poised to outsell the 360 any month now. Allegedly, the PS3 is only about 2 or 3 million units behind the 360 and could overtake it any month now.

This would most certainly be an achievement for Sony and I'm sure someone at Sony HQ will get a nice little bonus and a pat on the back, but almost immediately it'll be business as usual for Sony and I doubt very much that anything will change.

It seems, however, that some people think that this is a bigger deal than it really is. In fact, since the launch of the PS3, some gamers seem oddly obsessed with the idea of the PS3 overtaking the 360. Almost every year there's a spat of articles predicting that sales of the PS3 would overtake the 360 that year, even as far back as 2008 (2009, 2011, 2012).

In the early days of the "console war", I can almost understand the fixation. Looking at previous generations, everyone knows that when one console overtakes another, it tends to go on to be the best console and the one left in the dust often gets discontinued, such as what happened with the PS2 and the Dreamcast. Yet, it has been over 5 years since the 360 launched, it's no longer a "Next-gen" console war, it's just a regular "current-gen" console war and frankly, this war is getting a bit long in the tooth. I have no doubt that the PlayStation 3 will overtake the Xbox 360 at some point, but here's what most people seem to be missing - it wont change anything.

For the sake of argument, lets pretend that the 3million Xbox360's have succumbed to the RROD and that not a single PS3 has died, meaning that right now, sony has sold exactly the same number of PS3's as Microsoft has sold 360's. In fact, lets say Sony has sold 1 additional console and that the PS3 is now in the lead. What happens next?

Something tells me that Activision will still bring out Call of Duty 8 on both consoles, Microsoft will continue selling Kinect and millions of gamers who don't know any better will continue to buy Halo-branded games, overpriced accessories and chat to their mates on live. Indeed, in this scenario, Microsoft still owns 49.999% of the market (Side-note: In the UK, a company is said to have "monopoly power" if it owns just 25% of the market) and any respectable game developer or publisher would be silly to ignore that, especially as by now they've got their development pipelines sorted out to the point that porting from one console to the other takes a lot less time than it used to (And it was worth doing back when the 360 had a 9 million console head start).

A hard, cold fact that a lot of platform-conscious gamers (aka fanboys) tend to ignore is that games these days cost a lot of money to make. A hell of a lot of money, in some cases and the revenue from just one platform isn't going to make that money back. Well, not unless you've got something like Halo on your hands but those uber-successful franchises are few and far between and businesses are all about minimising risk and maximising profits.

"But what about the 360's old hardware limiting games?" I hear you say? Well, the problem once again comes down to money. Making a game that really takes advantage of the 360 costs quite a bit of money. Making one that takes advantage of it and more takes even more money, but when you go beyond those limits, you cut your market in half. That's not exactly economical and sooner or later, your publisher is going to put its foot down and tell you, as a developer, to ship the game by a certain date or else. Despite the claims that the gaming industry is "recession-proof", it's hard to ignore the number of studios that have closed down in recent months:

• Bizzare Creations


• FASA


• Sony Studio Liverpool


• Midway


• 3D Realms


• Ensemble


• GRIN


• Free Radical (Now Crytek UK)


• Factor 5

I could go on and on, but to be honest, it was sad enough noting down some of those names.

You could argue that some of those names brought their own misfortune upon themselves by releasing terrible games (or not releasing anything at all - you know who I'm talking about), but there's too many great names there for them all to have failed due to misfires and poor decisions.

It's almost sad to say, but if you don't have a practically unlimited budget supplied by your first-party publisher, it doesn't make sense to be exclusive any more.

Of course, with all this talk of consoles overtaking other consoles, it's easy to overlook that red herring we call the Wii. By my counts, the Wii has sold something like (roughly) 80million units, compared to the (roughly) 48million PS3's and (roughly) 50million Xbox 360's. But does anyone ever count the Wii? No. "It's not a next-gen console" people cry. In that case, The Move and Kinect are not "next-gen" peripherals, but people still treat them as such. As far as I'm concerned, the Wii is just as Valid at playing the numbers game as any other console. It has sold 30million more units than the 360, yet publishers and developers alike aren't exactly stopping all "HD-development" in favour of it, so what makes anyone thing that the PS3 selling a few hundred thousand, or even a few million, more will change anything?

There's absolutely no reason for anything to change. If the PS3 overtook the 360 a couple of years ago, perhaps things would be different, but this late in the game, both consoles may as well call it a draw and we can start the whole battle all over again with the real next-gen consoles, whenever they may arrive.