Yesterday, Dave Karraker made a bold prediction about sales figures for video game consoles that were due out today. Sony said it was confident the figures would show that in July its PlayStation 3 outsold the Xbox 360, made by its chief rival, Microsoft.

The actual figures from NPD Group, a market research firm, did not bear this out. For the record, NPD reported domestic sales of 425,000 Nintendo Wiis, 170,000 Xbox 360s and 159,000 PlayStation 3s in July.

Dave Karraker, the Sony spokesman who predicted the PS3 would overtake the 360, said that: (1) He was only wrong by a bit, and (2) NPD doesn’t provide an exact count but estimates some portions of the market and (3) No, he would not care to make a prediction about August’s sales figures.

The results, in fairness to Sony, do represent a marked improvement relative to Microsoft. In June, PS3 sales were roughly half of Xbox 360’s 200,000.

Could it be that Sony’s price cut has shaken loose consumer demand?
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Filed under: Console news, ps3 weekly sales