It’s pretty much common knowledge now that the Xbox One has been outsold by the PlayStation 4. It’s been documented that the PlayStation 3 successor has attracted more players from both Microsoft and Nintendo (according to a recent study an vb
few months back), and the Xbox One console itself has been lagging behind the PlayStation 4 since at least mid-July, which celebrated 10 million units sold worldwide (along with being the top-selling console for the seventh month in a row at the time) back in August.
Now it’s come to light that the PlayStation 4 has outsold the Xbox One by at least 42 percent, according to an analytical estimate via Ars Technica . This estimate was taken from sales through the month of September, and has therefore made the PlayStation 4 “ responsible for at least 59 percent of hardware sales in the two-console market. ”
“ Determining those ratios was not a simple process, ” Ars Technica explained, as it went through how it estimated the numbers. “ As a starting point, we used Microsoft’s announcement that it had shipped five million units of the Xbox One as of mid-April . Since then, the company has only released quarterly reports on how many total Xbox systems have shipped, lumping the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One together, which obscures the new console’s true market performance.
“ For the April to June quarter, there were 1.1 million combined Xbox shipments . For the July through September quarter, there were 2.4 million combined Xbox shipments . Add all those numbers together, and you get an absolute ceiling of 8.5 million potential Xbox One shipments through September, ” Ars Technica continues. “ For the new system to hit that ceiling, though, you’d have to assume that Microsoft has shipped exactly zero Xbox 360 units in the last six months, which is obviously false. ”
As it went on about how it tried to comb out how many Xbox Ones were sold in the recent months, Ars Technica then continued on to the PlayStation 4, which it claims the process of which was a little simpler and easier to track.
“ Sony announced on August 12 that it had sold 10 million PS4 units through to consumers worldwide. That announcement came 130 days after the company announced seven million sales , meaning Sony had sold an average of just over 23,000 PS4 units a day in the intervening period, ” Ars Technica went on.
“ Even assuming PS4 sales absolutely cratered after that, selling half as quickly, Sony would still have sold about 560,000 additional PS4 units in the 49 days from August 12 to the end of September. Add that, and we get a floor of about 10.56 million PS4s sold through the end of September, compared to a ceiling of about 7.42 million Xbox One units sold by the same time. ”
Despite the numbers, Ars Technica believes that it won’t be really be detrimental to the Xbox One in terms of getting third-party developers to make games for the console, but–having said that–Microsoft might need to worry if Sony’s lead with the PlayStation 4 keeps on expanding, because it might deter bigwig publishers from wanting to publish their games on the Xbox One. According to Ars Technica, Crysis and. Ryse: Son of Rome developer, Crytek, has already expressed that it is “ not 100 percent happy with Xbox One sales. ”
Of course, things could just as well turn around later on; the Xbox One could increase in sales later in its lifetime, or the PlayStation 4 could still hold its 40 percent estimate dominance. To put simply, though, things are looking up for the PlayStation 4, whilst the Xbox One seemingly has a lot of ground to pick up.
You can read Ar Technica’s analysis via the source link below. We’ll bring you more news on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 should further information reach our ears.
[ Ars Technica ]