Sony and Microsoft have both released sales numbers for the past few months, and it looks like both consoles have sold well. This does give us the chance to do some comparisons, and maybe read a bit into just what each company is actually saying. Sony announced first that it has sold over 7 million units of the PS4. This means that in the past 2 months, the Playstation 4 has sold 1.7 million units, which is an amazing number of consoles. In addition to this, 20 million units of sofware for the PS4 have been sold, which is 2.85 games per console. Not bad for a system that has been out for less than a year.
Microsoft did some bragging of their own, congratulating Titanfall developer EA on being the best selling game of the month of March, and boasting that 311,000 consoles were sold to retailers during the month of Titanfall’s release, bringing the total number to five million sold. According to Xbox corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi, this means a 60% more units than the Xbox 360 at the same point in time in the last generation. There are some important caveats to the story told by Microsoft: these are numbers based on units sold to stores. In other words, we don’t know if these units have moved, or if they are languishing in shelves waiting to be picked up. While Titanfall has clearly helped Microsoft move units, the way in which they have shaped their announcement sounds like they are trying to show the most positive numbers possible to make sure they don’t seem very far behind their competition.
A more interesting number is the one discussed here, there was a fall of 28% on the sale of software in March, despite a strong line-up consisting of games like Titanfall, Infamous Second Son, and Dark Souls 2. This might sound alarming at first, but the hardware sales brought the industry to a positive of 3% overall. While there are no solid numbers as to how many units of Titanfall were sold, it would be interesting to know how many that was, and of that number, which were part of the popular Titanfall Xbox One bundle, which featured a rather deep discount. Either way both consoles are showing strong growth only a few months into their life cycle, and the drop in software sales could very well be due to consumers acquiring new hardware.
In the interest of the consoles wars, however, we’ll have to call Sony a winner. At least for now.
