EA thinks PS3 year-end shipment numbers exaggerated

GI.biz reports Electronic Arts CFO, Warren Jenson, says they don't believe Sony will hit their year-end PS3 shipment of 2 million consoles for North America and Japan. The North American shipment was to be between 1 and 1.2 million units. This 2 million target keeps being debated back and forth. A few weeks ago Sony had us spinning over a Bloomberg report (since pulled), that didn't jive with a Gamespot interview, to the point where the spin had become so bad, all we could confirm was a direct quote from Sony's Jack Tretton saying, "Sony Playstation 3 is in full production and our target quantities for North America remain unchanged ... We plan to have more than one million systems in North America by December 31, 2006"

Not so says EA. EA estimates that the North American PS3 shipment will reach 500,000 to 800,000 units by the end of the year, 25% to 50% less than Sony's official statement. Jenson says this is "approximately what Microsoft sold last year on the Xbox 360." We don't know if EA is privy to the real facts, given they are a major supplier of titles to Sony and probably require production numbers to not overproduce games, but this is a bold statement and flies in the face of previous reports.