Sony Corp. reported similar numbers of Playstation 3 units sold in Europe as it did earlier for the United States. The company sold a record number of 1.2 million last-generation gaming consoles in Europe during the holiday shopping season after lowering prices to compete against Nintendo Co.'s Wii.

Sony is expected to sell about 8 million PlayStation 3s in the year ending March 31, missing its annual target of 11 million units by almost 30 percent. Nintendo is expected to sell almost 20 million Wii machines while Microsoft will probably ship around 9 million Xbox 360 consoles.

Sony also said it will give up the Playstation 3 models featuring 20Gb and 60Gb hard drives, in favor of a 40Gb model that's cheaper than both but lacks backwards compatibility, thus running only the latest games compiled for the gaming powerhouse.

The Japanese company announced earlier that during December it has sold 1.2 million PS3s in the United States in 39 days, from November 23 to December 31. Shortly after Thanksgiving weekend, Howard Stringer, Sony CEO, announced that PS3 is selling 200,000 units per week. The main problem Stringer has had to deal with since his 2005 appointment as a Sony CEO was the losses in the games department, where costs for developing the PS3 have grown too high and the sales of Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 have exceeded the PS3 sales.

Despite the hype generated by the holiday season, the revival of Sony’s gaming machine is based also on the drastic price cuts. Sony has also aggressively promoted PS3 as a Blu-ray player. However, PS2 still managed to surpass its bigger brother and it sold 1.3 million units during the same period.

Apparently, Sony understood that while its gaming console holds the top spot when it comes to performance, its rivals were offering more bang for the buyers' bucks. It is quite clear that Sony will not give up on its PS3 and will push it to the market aggressively. Meanwhile, the price wars between Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have made last-generation consoles an affordable buy.