It has been estimated that Sony’s Playstation 4 sold 66% more units in the United States than the Xbox One for both console launches in November 2013.
This is according to industry analyst Micheal Pachter, who said in his recent investment note on the state of the gaming industry that the Playstation 4 is estimated to have sold 1.25 million units during the launch weekend starting 15 November 2013. The console has sold out on store shelves across the country.
This compares favourably to sales of the Xbox One, which Pachter estimates at around 750,000 units, a good half a million units behind Sony’s day one sales in what has traditionally been Team Green’s strongest market.
Pachter notes that Sony had a week-long head-start over Microsoft and also chose to send a sizeable unit allocation to America, while Microsoft’s launch stretched across thirteen countries and moved over a million units in the same time-frame as Sony.
The sales estimates come with a dire warning for Microsoft, as Pachter believes that Microsoft’s higher hardware cost will be the detriment to the console’s adoption among gamers.
Speaking with Games Industry in an exclusive interview, Pachter said, “The reason Sony beats Microsoft is solely the price. Microsoft loses the next generation unless they cut price. If Microsoft drops its price to $399, I expect the sales to be equal to the PS4.”
But this, Pachter notes, is just a short-term solution for Microsoft as they move to stifle more bad publicity for the company and the platform. The real progress, he believes, will not be for the console markets, but for the PC.
“I don’t know where they get those numbers. I don’t think you’re ever going to see 500 million consoles out there. The next generation of consoles is probably the last. We expect frequent model updates instead of new consoles. I think the PC is going to make a comeback, the PC will be the hub of all this stuff,” he added.
Sources: MCVUK, Games Industry
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This would not have been a problem if the kinect wasn’t integrated into the xbone as mandatory,
Microsoft have made dubious decisions since the inception of xbone. The game sharing debacle, the always online gaming issue, all these have been BAD decisions by Microsoft.It’s going to affect them this time around, I see the ps4 winning this time around.