Hot off the press, Sony has officially announced that they have exceeded 1 million PS3 shipments in North America alone. After being forced to cut year-end shipment predictions by half, and then having only shipped 197k units to retail, supply issues looked dismal for Sony.
Sony firmly stood by their claim of shipping 1,000,000 PlayStation 3 consoles before 2006 comes to an end. With much doubt behind them, it seems like as soon as Sony's Blue Laser Diode manufacturing went into the full-swing of things, the consoles began to pour in shipments.
When asked if he was concerned about the lead the X360 and Wii have over the PS3, Sony's head of PR David Karraker said: "Are we worried about strong sales of the Wii or Xbox 360? Not really. It was a great year for the industry overall. With the tide all ships rise."
At the moment, world-wide sales of the PS3 aren't known. Rough estimates suggest that 500-600k units have shipped in Japan, which would have the PS3 somewhere around 1.5M-1.6M mark. According to Nintendo, the Wii is still projected to have shipped 4 million units between November and December 2006. Both Sony and Nintendo hold steady of their predictions to have 6 million of their respective units out there by March 2007. On the spectrum of an established next-gen console, Microsoft has just announced that the X360 has surpassed the 10 million mark.
Things are getting hot, folks. It's anybody's game.