Sony are adamant that, despite coming in a distant third, the PlayStation 3 is a serious contender and one that in a year or so will dominate gaming with its raw, over-priced horsepower.

Sales of their exclusive titles, a key driver to unit sales, tell a different story. Sony’s only exclusive may actually be hubris if these figures are anything to go by. GameSetWatch’s bean counter Matt Matthews has studied sales of some of the PS3’s big guns (excluding pack-in bundle copies) and the figures make for depressing reading if you’re rooting for Sony.

The original Resistance takes the top slot with lifetime sales of over a million with critical darling LittleBigPlanet coming second with almost a million. But Sony’s great white hope, Killzone 2, has barely scratched 750,000 in its first months on the market. To compare, its Xbox 360 nemesis Halo 3 sold 1.8 million copies in its first 8 hours of release.

Sony are putting a lot of money and muscle behind their exclusive launches and while the games are performing well critically, the public doesn’t seem to care enough to lay down their hard earned cash. Matthews speculates that Sony put too much faith into new IPs at launch rather than established franchises such as God of War, which is still 9 months from release.

It’s interesting reading and we strongly suggest having a look, if only to add more credence to Activision’s concerns that the PS3 is not a commercially viable format for the moment and, unless something is done, will never be.