Up until now, the PS4 has been dominating its competitor. Partially due to Microsoft’s sketchy DRM policies prior to the console’s release, partially due to the fact that they only recently let you buy the console without the Kinect, and partially due to a whole bunch of other minor scandals such as resolutiongate, the Xbox One lost a lot of ground with fans in its early days, catapulting Sony to the top of the console mountain.
But since E3 2015, the Xbox One has seen an incredible swing of sales. Sales rose a massive 79 percent compared to the week of E3 2014, and 51 percent for June overall. Active Xbox Live users also rose 22 percent during June.
For the week of E3 2015, the Xbox One actually outsold the PS4, one of the first times its sales managed to pass the PS4. Many analysts have attributed this to the Xbox One’s reveal of backward compatibility at E3. This made a lot of 360 owners that have been on the fence about upgrading feel more secure in their purchase of a next generation system.
That being said, the PS4 still topped the monthly charts for June. The Xbox One likely would have won, if not for the Batman: Arkham Knight bundle. The bundle includes the game and a system, all for the base system’s price. For fans of the Batman Arkham trilogy, this was too good a deal to pass up.
The last time the Xbox One was number one was this April, with the PS4 pulling ahead since then. However, the numbers are much closer together now than they ever were toward the beginning of these console’s life cycles. Not to mention that the Xbox One’s sales growth is raising much faster than the PS4’s.
So this, of course, makes people ask who is winning the console war, and once again it’s a tricky to answer. From a detached perspective, every company really got what they wanted out of E3. Sony got hardcore Japanese game fans, Nintendo got Nintendo fans, and Microsoft got everyone else, from VR fans with their deals with Oculus to 360 fans looking to ride off backward compatibility. At the same time, there were a lot of upsets in Sony’s favor, such as netting a deal with Activision to put out Call of Duty content on their console first.
If the Xbox One keeps up its momentum and continues to increase its sales by figures over 50% then it will very quickly overtake the PS4. But we are quickly heading to a point of market saturation, so Xbox will have to overtake PS4 soon in order to keep that momentum up for the rest of the console generation.
What do you think? Who is winning the console wars? Let us know in the comments.