PS3 Slim sales: 999% up!

UK sales monitor, Chart-Track, has just released data showing that the launch of the PS3 Slim has been a super-soaraway success.

Sales of the slightly thinner, slightly cheaper, certainly sexier PS3 Slim have accounted for an increase of 999% over the space of seven short, but presumably very frantic days. That certainly sounds impressive. By all accounts the Slim has outsold the Wii, DS Lite and Xbox 360 by a ratio of 3:1 during the same time-frame too. But then the wheels of the hype-wagon begin to wobble slightly...

Y’see, trotting out statistics like this is kind of meaningless when neither Sony nor Chart-Track will reveal what PlayStation 3 sales were like before the Slim launched, or how many the new machine has sold subsequently. And are we really to suppose that the Wii, DS Lite and Xbox 360 were all selling exactly the same amount in the same week? That’d be some kind of first if it’s true – especially when you remember that the Xbox 360 Elite is supposed to be enjoying a sales spike of its own at the moment too.

But stats are stats, and these definitely show that the Slim has had a successful launch in the UK – even if the cack-handed efforts of the Sony PR machine mean that we’re unable to measure it properly. It’s had a quantifiably record-breaking launch in Japan, though. The new unit has shifted over 150,000 since launching at the weekend – the fat old PlayStation 3 had managed just 1,040 the previous week. Now that’s what we call an uplift!!