Market research this month by recognised authority Business Week magazine estimated that Sony PlayStation 3 sales will be topping the two hundred million units mark within the next five years. The first twelve million of these are estimated to come in the first year after the consoles release this coming Spring.

To just make this clear – this estimate is over twice the amount of PS2 units which have been sold in the last five years.

SPOnG wants to wait to see how the initial launch of the PS3 fares throughout 2006, before we feel that we can authoritatively comment on such bold claims for the console. The Business Week figures are based on the assumption that videogaming will continue to become more popular and mainstream at an exponential rate over the next five years.

Whilst SPOnG hopes that this is the case, we would currently urge industry analysts to be a little more conservative in their projections, in light of this Christmas’ fairly slow sales of games software and hardware. The idea that the market for console videogames will double worldwide over the next five years just seems a little too overoptimistic in our opinion. But perhaps that’s because we’ve eaten too much turkey and drank too much European fighting lager in the last three days to be in any fit state to offer a reasonable comment on Business Week’s projections.

In the other next-gen camp, Microsoft hit back with the even more unbelievable assertion that they plan to reach a billion consumers via their Xbox 360. Again, SPOnG urges a more conservative approach and thinks that we should perhaps wait to see if our friends at the American Uber-Corp can get out the three million Xbox 360s which was their target for the first three months post-launch. We'll be sure to come back to this at the end of February to see how close they are to that target.

Spong