Croal & Keighley On The NPD Numbers

Newsweek's N'Gai Croal and everything's Geoff Keighley hash it out in one of Croal's now-legendary email battles over this month's NPD sales numbers, which saw Wii dominate and PlayStation 3 plummet. It's a long read with lots of insight, but I especially found this exchange interesting:

Keighley: Already third party executives are telling me that if PS3 sales stay below 100k for 3 consecutive months, PS3 SKUs may start disappearing from release lists and in turn create a wealth of de-facto exclusives for the Xbox 360.

Croal, later: [W]hat I'm hearing is that... some publishers have been more or less sitting on completed ports in hopes that the PS3 installed base would grow more significantly during the interim. So much for [that].

There's plenty more to discover, including N'Gai being one of the only other people besides me to cast serious doubt on the old "Wii sales will drop off because the hardware is too weak" chestnut that fanboys and industry execs seem to be clinging to desperately. I'll have a lot more to say about Nintendo when the embargo on their media summit coverage lifts Friday morning; for now, read this piece.
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