Strolling (metaphorically, of course) around the internet will probably give you the wrong impression of anything, when you think about it. It pretty much depends where you’re strolling – if you happen upon RaptureReady and for some reason – I don’t know, maybe you’re writing an article on a PS3 news site and need a vague, but strangely amusing example – you look up it’s Alexa ranking and find that it’s got a rank of 45,218, you might think that the internet is full of religious extremists who open their arms to the rapture and have useful questions in their FAQ, such as ‘How do you intend to maintain this site after the rapture?‘.

If you stumble upon the comments section of a console-related article on Digg you may come away thinking that the internet is held up on the shoulders of those who hate that console. And I don’t mean have a distaste for it, I mean they hate it like it walked into their house on christmas and relieved itself on the christmas dinner.

Of the three consoles, the other two haven’t had it as bad as the PS3. Sony got the PS3 into a slow start a year or so after it’s closest competitor got to it’s own slow start and was, subsequently, pitched against a console that was already on it’s legs and another console that it isn’t really competing with directly. Obviously, the former is the 360 and the latter is the Wii, and the as the PS3 struggled through these painful times with just the few faithful Playstation loyalists by it’s side it recieved a lot of bad press. You might argue that it even deserved some of it, Sony definitely made some mistakes, but much of it was unwarranted.

If you remember our [Generic 'PS3 is Dying' Metaphor Here] article from back in December, the PS3 wasn’t doing anywhere near as badly as the internet trolls seemed to think it was, and that’s even more true now. Yet the bridge-dwellers still pummel the console, and it continues to be pummelled more than the Wii and the 360 even to this day. Behold, some evidence, flimsy as it may be, that the PS3 is more popular than the impression the average person may get from any particular gaming website.

Click to see a bigger, more legible version.

As you can see, yesterday on N4G the top 5 hottest news stories were, barring a single speculative opinion piece on the next Xbox at number 1, all Sony-related, with the other four split evenly between PS3 news and PSP news. The hottest games list is dominated by the PS3, five of them (that’s positions 1,2, 5, 6 and 7) are PS3 games, 4 of them are 360 games, and one is World of Warcraft. If you remove console-specific games from the equation, there’s 3 for PS3 and 1 for 360 (and 1 for PC), not to mention that the top spot, Killzone 2, is 8370 degrees above the second slot (which is the PS3 version of FFXIII) and 17850 above the only 360 exclusive game there. Obviously, that last one isn’t really a few comparison, Halo 3 is an old game by now, but there are no other 360 exclusive games in the top 10, so what else am I supposed to do?

You might think; ‘even stranger is the complete lack of Wii games on there’ but, when you think about it, it’s not really that strange. The majority of the N4G audience are going to be the people who have one of the ‘more hardcore’ consoles and probably look down the Wii for being a children’s toy. Which is almost about right, really. But only almost. Obviously, people are above the Wii, but not above laughing at teabagging (that story is, at the time of writing, the 5th hottest N4G story).

There’s less trash talk directed at the PS3 now, too. Granted, comments like ‘the PS3 haz gamez now?’ still crop up, but they’re immediately countered by a long list of brilliant PS3 games that should probably be kept on a webpage somewhere for use in just such an occasion and always ends with the PS3’s best ace to date: Killzone 2. It’s the best looking game on consoles right now, bar none, without even using the PS3’s full capacity power, and it plays brilliantly online and off, so it’s only natural that it will be used to shut the trash talking idiots up.

So it’s clear that the PS3 is doing better than a lot of people would like to think, and it hasn’t even played it’s hand yet. Unlike the 360, which has already played the likes of Halo 3 and anything else I can think of off hand, the franchises that are being carried up a generation haven’t all been played yet. God of War 3 is to release this year, as is Gran Turismo 5, two massively successful franchises, one of which stretches all the way from the PSOne. These, along with the likes of MAG, inFAMOUS, Uncharted 2, and all the other huge PS3 releases this year, combined with PSN releases like Fat Princess, Pixeljunk 1-4 and the others, all point towards a hugely successful year for the PS3.

Sony must be as happy as Sackboy right now.

And just look how happy he is!

Filed under: Features, Playstation Home, Playstation Network, Playstation Store, Social Networking, Sony news