Worldwide Console Hardware Sales Compared

Thanks to GameSpy for their import gaming column which also collates the total hardware sales for all the major consoles by territory, information that's often hard to find in one place. The article points out: "Generally speaking, worldwide, the PlayStation 2 is crushing the competition, having sold millions and millions more consoles than the Xbox or GameCube", and "Xbox seems to be more popular [than GameCube] in both North America and Europe", leading Nintendo's console by a million in the U.S. and a couple of hundred thousand in Europe. But in the East, the situation is different, since "hardly anybody is buying the Xbox in Japan", and the GameCube has a one-and-a-half million console advantage, further bolstered by a recent weekly chart that has the GC selling 16,841 consoles, and Xbox selling just 530 machines.

Comments

Re:Low numbers for europe

[weicco]

Nah, I don't think that's the reason. At least kids in my neighbourhood speaks, and especially writes, english better than finnish which is their native language :)

Re:Low numbers for europe

[CheeseEatingBulldog]

I doubt it has anything to do with local language, here in holland all films are in the original language with dutch subtitles, plus most advertising is still in English. The French and Germans still dub all films and tv though, but big games like Final Fanstasy are translated anyway. Europeans generally learn other languages to broaden their horizons...and to understand their fellow humans.

GBA was a surprise for me

[chia_monkey]

I pretty much expected to see the PS2 numbers squashing XBox, especially in Japan and such. I wanted to see the numbers, ponder marketing, social differences, etc. But when I saw the GBA sales also crushing XBox, that's what surprised me. I remember when Game Boy was just a fun little portable thing to play Tetris on. To see it blowing away the XBox in sales is cool...interesting and cool. Now to ponder what this all means in the grand scheme of things and if there will ever be another competitor to GBA (well, Game Boy had some at least).