Report: PS4 Is Selling Twice As Well As Xbox One (arstechnica.com)

The latest numbers released by analysts suggest that the Sony PlayStation 4 is selling twice as many units worldwide as the Xbox One since both systems launched in late 2013. The data comes from a new SuperData report on the Nintendo Switch, which is backed up by Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad. SuperData mentions an installed base of 26 million Xbox One units and 55 million PS4 units. Ars Technica reports: Ahmad's chart suggests that Microsoft may have sold slightly more than half of the 53.4 million PS4 units that Sony recently announced it had sold through January 1. Specific numbers aside, though, it's clear Microsoft has done little to close its console sales gap with Sony over the past year -- and may have actually lost ground in that time. The last time we did our own estimate of worldwide console sales, through the end of 2015, we showed the Xbox One with about 57 percent as many systems sold as the PS4 (21.49 million vs. 37.7 million). That lines up broadly with numbers leaked by EA at the time, which suggest the Xbox One had sold about 52.9 percent as well as the PS4 (19 million vs. 35.9 million). One year later, that ratio has dipped to just above or even a bit below 50 percent, according to these reports. The relative sales performance of the Xbox One and PS4 doesn't say anything direct about the health or quality of those platforms, of course. Microsoft doesn't seem to be in any danger of abandoning the Xbox One platform any time soon and has, in fact, recently committed to upgrading it via Project Scorpio later this year. The gap between PS4 and Xbox One sales becomes important only if it becomes so big that publishers start to consider the Xbox One market as a minor afterthought that can be safely ignored for everything but niche games.

Comments

Welcome to the Osborne Effect

[SuperKendall]

For those not up on computer history, Osborne was a computer maker that announced a great new model coming in a year... so sales started tanking while people waited... which meant there was no model in a year (or maybe there was, my memory is fuzzy on that detail).

I think MS was really dumb to try and compete with the PS4 Pro by saying they would have improved hardware next year. All they had to do was literally nothing, the PS4 Pro is not big enough of a bump that it would have effected XBox sales...

Although really it seems like XBox sales have been lagging even before the recent hardware upgrade was announced.

Re:Welcome to the Osborne Effect

[gman003]

Good theory, but I think you're wrong. That's not what's hurting Microsoft - Sony did the same thing, with rumors of the "Neo" appearing shortly after the console itself launched. And yet the PS4 still sold quite well from day one.

What hurt the Xb1 is that it's demonstrably weaker than the PS4, but cost significantly more at launch ($500 compared to $400). Most games are available on both, so the natural inclination is to go with the cheaper and more powerful console. With a wide library of shared games, there's lots of direct comparisons to make, and even before they launched, it was easy to tell the PS4 would be more powerful. That gave the PS4 a very strong advantage during the first year or two.

Even now, they only have price-parity, with both having an entry price around $250-$300. But more people already have a PS4, making that the more attractive option both for multiplayer gaming (if all your friends are on PS4, you'd want one too) and for the larger percentage of third-party exclusive titles (it's nowhere near as big a deal as it once was, since porting is so easy, but there's still some studios that are deciding to skip the Xb1 because the audience is smaller). And it seems to me (as a non-Xb1, non-PS4 gamer) that Sony's shoveling the money from their console sales into more first-party games, giving it a still stronger library, which is ultimately what every gamer cares about.

Microsoft doesn't have a lot of options for coming back from this, just as the PS3 struggled to come back from the Xb360's early lead and the XbC never came close to the PS2. They could make the Scorpio be *substantially* more powerful than the PS4 Pro, making it more future-proof and maybe able to handle 4K/VR better. They could slash the price, and hope to catch up that way, but that's a risky move. They could pin it on VR or AR, but that's riskier still. They could double-down on their cross-play with PC bets - make every single Xb1 game PC-compatible and bundle a PC version, which would widen their library (although it would cannibalize Scorpio somewhat). Or they could go on a spending spree and buy up every developer they can, and kill off the PS4's third-party support - Sony is no Nintendo, they can't survive on first-party games alone (even Nintendo might not do so much longer).

Largest yet deployment of FreeBSD?

[Brian Feldman]

I am quite curious if Sony is now the leading manufacturer of consumer electronics powered by FreeBSD. The only other manufacturer that I think may be in the running would be Panasonic, with FreeBSD as the basis for their televisions.