Surface Math

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/06/playstation.nintendo

Why do I get the feeling that this guy has never taken calculus or applied it in a physics context? It seems he just went on an appeal to those who never learned math past the surface.

Ignoring the fact that the target audience is completely different for the moment, if you look at what he’s talking about, the acceleration of sales is higher for PS3 than Wii even though the velocity of sales for the PS3 is currently lower. He’s right that the PS3 cannot overtake the Wii while its velocity is lower than that of the Wii, but he’s ignoring that if the acceleration remains higher the velocity will eventually be higher as well. Thus, of the terms that he mocked, the closest to being accurate is that relative to the PS3, the Wii is slowing down. It’ll still take awhile to overtake the wii either in position or velocity.

Sometime I’ll have to write the formulas out and solve for exactly how long it will take for the PS3 to overtake at the current acceleration values. I suspect the number would be in the 5-6 years range. So realistically Sony still needs to get some solid titles out in order to make this a realistic goal and start pushing that acceleration value up. I suspect it may not really get substantial accel until the casual games really start coming out for the PS3. That will be 1-2 years from now at the earliest. Casual games, after all, are the driver of high volume console sales as shown by where the bulk of the sales for the PS1, PS2, and Wii came from.