According to an article at Boomtown.net, Sony Computer Entertainment America communications exec Dave Karraker has said that he believes the Wii is little more than a novelty, implying that it would soon wear off as gamers yearned for a real games console - although Sony said something similar about the PSP’s battle with the Nintendo DS.

Here’s the quote he gave to the Wall Street Journal: “We feel very confident that the PlayStation fan is going to wait until they can get a PlayStation 3,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “If they do pick up a Wii, it’s as more of a novelty.”

This comes at a time when the Wii is seemingly whipping the butt of Sony and Microsoft with record sales in territories across the globe, with the Australian launch of the Wii breaking Aussie gaming console sales records.

According to the Boomtown article, “Sony made similar comments when the DS and PSP went head to head”. Of course we know that the Nintendo DS and the DS Lite have done very well against the Sony PSP in all territories.

Sony have also been in the news in the past 24 hours with the revelation that a blog entitled ‘alliwantforxmasisapsp.com’ was actually a paid for site that pretended to be one created by a potential consumer desperate for his parents to buy him a PSP.

Unfortunately the site appeared to be a little too excited about the PSP and didn’t seem ‘authentic’ enough, which led some users to determine who owned the site. It turned out to be a marketing/PR company in Sony’s employ. Sony came clean on the blog, admitting they’d paid to have the site created and were busted, with the site reverting to being an ad for the PSP.

The PSP is actually a very nifty device, and caused much oohing and ahhing when it launched over a year ago. While rumours of a PSP 2 persist, one will probably not appear until at least mid 2007 if not later. PSP movies and some titles are now very inexpensive in stores, making the PSP a better and cheaper handheld console than ever.

Despite the PSP’s superiority over the Nintendo DS, the DS has continued selling well across the globe thanks to innovative games that aim at all age groups. It will be very interesting to see how Christmas season sales for both handheld consoles fare, although realistically as both are in plentiful supply, we can safely guess than millions will be sold making both companies very happy indeed.

Sony continues to insist that 2 million PS3’s will be sold by the end of the year, but as Nintendo insists they will ship 4 million units, they’ll be the clear No.2 behind Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which is still the No.1 next-gen games console out there in terms of sales, which is obviously helped enormously by the fact it is over a year old.

People are quick to write off the Xbox 360 and even the PS3 compared with the Wii, but both are amazing consoles that you’d be happy to own. The Xbox 360 has had its best games of recent times, with plenty more promised for 2007, while the PS3 has its real chance to shine all throughout 2007. The PS2 is also expected to have a bumper Christmas season as the cheapest games console out there with the largest library of games.

And while stories of the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 battles will continue raging in the lead up to Christmas 2006 and all throughout 2007, we’ll just have to wait until January 2008 to get the full picture on how well each console has fared, including the comparison against presumably continuing PS2 sales. There’s a long way to go before we get to that date!

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