The PS4 VS Xbox One console battle in the United States has taken a decided turn, with the NPD sales numbers for January definitely declaring the Sony PlayStation 4 the winner.
In a related report by The Inquisitr , some people might be surprised the PlayStation 4?s NPD sales numbers in December were beat not by Microsoft but by the Nintendo 3DS! Still, at least in the US the 908,000 Xbox One units sold made Microsoft the winner over the holidays, just not around the world. Some of this can be chalked up to the PS4 launching in 48 countries while the Xbox One launch countries only numbered 13. Because of this PlayStation 4 availability was very poor and it’s still almost impossible to find a PS4 in stock . (Oh, and here’s several good reasons why reselling a PS4 on eBay is a waste of your time and money .)
PlayStation marketing VP John Koller claims that since launching on November 15 Sony has sold every single PS4 shipped to the United States. This is fairly impressive even when you consider the marketing advantage they have from selling the PS4 for $100 cheaper in comparison to the Xbox One. It’s also claimed that the PlayStation outsold the Xbox One by a two-to-one margin, although neither Sony or Microsoft have released exact sales figures this time around. All in all, gamers spent an extra 17 percent on hardware this past month, bringing US sales up to $241 million.
The bad news is that software sales for games took a tumble according to the NPD , selling an astounding 40 percent less:
“Overall retail video game sales would be down only 1 percent instead of down 21 percent, if sales were normalized to account for the five-week January 2013 compared to the four-week January 2014.”
This is not surprising and Ubisoft even discussed that fact when discussing Assassin’s Creed 5 and how AC 4 sales numbers did not beat AC 3 even though many gamers considered the newer title a great improvement in gameplay.
Since games are what people buy a console for, this means the hardware sales could change dramatically as time marches on. Although people talk about how the PS4 is faster and prettier than the Xbox One , and some hope either a Xbox One patch or AMD Mantle can even out the GPU differences , the reality is that system exclusives do sell consoles. As it stands right now the only major console exclusive on the horizon is Titanfall for the Xbox One , although Infamous: Second Son on the PS4 will follow quickly on its heels. So it’s possible the Xbox One VS PS4 sales numbers battle could change dramatically in March. What do you think?