There is a great story doing the rounds on the interweb today, and that is that Australian retailers are going to stop selling Microsoft’s XBox 360. Apparently 10 retail chains, with over 2000 stores between them, were polled and they all see the sales growth this year coming from the Nintendo Wii and Sony’s PS3. One Melbourne based retailer is claimed as saying:-

“The Xbox 360 is dead. We are stocking it because of our relationship with Microsoft however all our energy and marketing is going into the PS3 and the Nintendo Wii unless Microsoft come up with something new or additional marketing dollars. Halo 3 was big on the Xbox but that was about it. They have tried discounting and value add offers and even that is not working. We are even thinking of dumping the console all together”

You can read the entire story here…

Now here’s my problem… Firstly, lets take a trip over to VGChartz.com and look at there excellent global sales charts by region. and familiarise ourselves with the Australian sales figures. These raise my first points…

1. Why would top retailers want to stop selling 360 stock when there are almost twice as many 360′s sitting in those aussie houses compared to the PS3? (345,366 vs. 201,916)

2. I have done some maths, and based on the sales for the first 13 weeks of this year so far there has been 35,822 360′s sold and 39,830 PS3′s sold, so to average that out, the PS3 outsells the 360 by 308 units a week. This means that at that rate it will take 9 years before the PS3 overtakes the user base of the 360. Now I realise that those trends won’t last forever, but it’s certainly worth noting that despite being out for 12 months longer and having sold far more already, that the 360 has still outsold the PS3 some weeks this year. Of course the PS3 has the Blu-ray advantage now HD-DVD has passed to that format heaven in the sky, but if rumors are true then the 360 will soon offer this support too, so the PS3 may not yet end up as the cheapest BR2.0 player on the market…

Now, on top of that, you only have to look in to who wrote this story… Mr. David W. Richards. No stranger to controversy, this is the guy that wrote the story claiming MS had to rewrite 60% of Vista’s code with just months left to release. He later admitted that it was based on a few comments by somebody who worked for ASUS. He was also pulled up for blatant plagiarism of stories on his ‘credible news site’ by ABC in Australia (video available here), but hours before the show was due to air, he posted a story on his site claiming his site had been hacked, and somebody was posting stories under his name (story here). So in my eyes, Mr. Richards is not the most credible of people, and as he uses a total of 0 hard facts to back himself up, I think the whole thing is fabricated… People, I think we have our new Jack Thompson!

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