This topic is rubbish. The PS2 is a great system, but if anything goes the way of the Dreamcast it will be the Gamecube. The Xbox is still selling strong and as far as games go, it is keeping up with the PS2. During this time of the year very few good games come out for the consoles and sales are lower than ever.
I work at Electronics Boutique, so I can give you first hand experience and figures on how the three systems do. I'll give you a rundown on the sales of the systems and their games...
November-December
Xbox preorders top at 104 at my store, with Gamecube preorders topping at 32. Similar numbers are reported across my district. Once the two consoles were released, we never ran out of Xbox, but we were re-supplied every 2 days with shipments of about 40-60. The day of the Xbox release was bigger than any day ever for my store. We made net sales of $22,000 on the Xbox's release. We sold our initial pre-order shipment of 32 GC's along with 4 non-presold within the first two days - the net sales were just under $6000 on the day of GC's release (which was a Sunday, WTF was Nintendo thinking?). We received a shipment of 12 GCs one week later. We didn't see another Gamecube until one week before Christmas. All the while Sony and MS are pumping out PS2 and Xbox. Despite EB only selling Xbox bundled with 3 games and an accessory we continue to keep the sales near the PS2. Nintendo continues to flop, and the associates in the stores start spreading more love for MS and Sony. Nintendo gets a boost of sales from Super Smash Bros. Melee and Pikmin, but we still have no systems to sell.
January-March
When Christmas is over we finally see a large (well, by Nintendo standards) shipment of 24 GC's. At this point we are actually all out of stock of Xbox and PS2, but quickly receive more within the first week of January. January is a slower month, but still the biggest for us until August or so. People redeem their Gift Cards and spend their Christmas money and continue to buy Xbox and PS2. Overall customer reaction to Xbox's games is rather good, and by far the biggest sellers are Halo, NFL Fever, and DOA 3. PS2 is still selling Grand Theft Auto 3 like hotcakes with FFX, Madden 2002, and Gran Turismo 3. The expected giant seller, Metal Gear Solid 2, didn't do so well in our area. It sold very well for the first week of its release, but sales quickly dropped.
At this point, Sony halts shipments of their memory cards and all third-party memory cards. Most of us assume it is just a massive sell-out from Chirstmas. When February rolls around, this starts to put a small dent into Sony's near-flawless armor. We warn people that they cannot save games for their PS2 unless they can find a memory card, but there NONE within a 50 mile radius. Every Wal-Mart, Target, Toys R Us, Babbage's, K-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City were out of stock of PS2 memory cards for months (and still are for that matter). People were warned and several purchased Xbox instead. Electronics Boutique saw a rather large trade-in of PS2s for Xbox as well.
We recently received the numbers of the company's performance as of March 31st. I have no problem posting the company's numbers for you guys. This may give you an indication on how well the three systems have done. This numbers are a percentage of the overall sales we had as a company.
PSone and PS2 hardware - 8%
Xbox hardware - 5%
Gamecube and N64 hardware - 1.7%
PS2 software - 20%
Xbox software - 15%
PC software - 12% (threw this in to give you guys an idea of how the PC is faring in the console wars)
Gamecube software - 9%
DVD - 6%