Xbox One is slowly narrowing its quarterly sales gap to the PS4 [Updated] |Techilink

With Microsoft showing a burst of new sales momentum over the past holiday season following some significant price cuts, there may have been some hope that the Xbox One could finally match or overtake the PS4 in sales in 2015. So far, that hasn’t been the case. Sony’s system continues to outsell the Xbox One globally by a healthy margin.

Sony’s earnings report today listed 2.4 million worldwide shipments of the PlayStation 4 for the first quarter of 2015. That number compares quite favorably to Microsoft’s earnings last week, which reported 1.6 million shipments of the PlayStation 4. all Xbox hardware, including the Xbox 360, during the same period. With an estimated year-over-year decline of 40 to 66 percent for Xbox 360 sales (in line with previous and current console transitions), Microsoft likely shipped between 1.12 and 1.34 million Xbox One systems from January to March pushed.

(The usual disclaimer about sales vs. shipments here… while the two numbers aren’t exactly equal, hardware units shipped to retail stores usually resell to consumers within four to six weeks, according to industry analysts. So most units shipped by end March have probably been taken off store shelves at this point, which has little bearing on the relative console race (the terms are used interchangeably throughout this piece.)

[Update (May 7): Nintendo has now announced its quarterly results which actually show a decline in quarterly shipments from a year ago. Nintendo sent out only 350,000 Wii U units worldwide in the first three months of the year, up only slightly from 310,000 a year ago. After relatively flat sales performance during the last holiday season, it seems any hopes for regained Wii U momentum are still absent.

The graphs in this piece have been updated to reflect the newly confirmed numbers, which are well below our previous generous estimates.]

Nintendo will announce quarterly Wii U sales in an earnings report next week, but there’s little reason to believe the system has suddenly become a serious part of the console market for the quarter. While Wii U sales showed some improvement last year, those sales started from a position well below Sony and Microsoft.

Even assuming a nearly 100 percent increase in year-over-year Wii U sales for the quarter (which would be much larger than last year’s jump), the Wii U would still only account for 600,000 units shipped for the quarter. quarter; about half the Xbox One and a quarter the performance of the PS4. We’ll update with official figures from Nintendo as soon as we have them, but for now it seems safe to say that the Wii U will continue to be a minor player in the console sales battle going forward.

Xbox feeling?

While the PlayStation 4 outsells the Xbox One every quarter, that’s no longer news rate Sony outperforming its rival shows some faint glimmers of hope for Microsoft to eventually close the gap. Recall that in the first quarter of 2014, the PS4 surpassed the Xbox One worldwide by 1.8 million units. Using that number as a base, a shortfall of around 1.2 million units before the start of 2015 might seem like a step in the right direction.

The “improvement” for Microsoft also holds up proportionally. In the first quarter of 2014, Xbox One sales accounted for 40 percent of PS4 sales. In 2015, the Xbox has sold about 50 percent as much as Sony so far. Additionally, in absolute terms, a shortfall of about 1.2 million units this quarter is probably the smallest Microsoft has seen since late 2013 (although the Xbox One has generally been much more competitive in relative terms during previous holiday seasons).

As a whole, though, “losing the quarterly sales race with less than before” is probably not the position Microsoft wants to be in. Sony still controls nearly 50 percent of the global console market, based on total lifetime shipments. , a number that has remained relatively unchanged since the middle of last year. Microsoft, on the other hand, hovers just under a third of all international shipments since launching in late 2013, barely increasing global market share in the first 15 months, by our estimates.

It’s important to note that these global sales trends can look very different when you zoom in on individual regions. In Japan, for example, the Wii U is winning the lifetime sales battle, according to tracking company Media Create, pushing its previous launch to more than 2.2 million units sold (although the PS4 leads sales so far for 2015). The PS4 has sold a total of over 1.4 million units in Japan, while the Xbox One limps with a paltry 50,000 units sold in the country.

Subtract these numbers from the global picture and the market in the non-Japanese speaking world is starting to look slightly different, though perhaps not materially. We’ve also seen some reports that the PS4 and Xbox One are running much closer to sales parity in North America than the rest of the world, although the source for that information isn’t secure enough to share that specific information. numbers with confidence.

All in all, the overall global video game console market looks much like it did three months ago, with Sony comfortably ahead, Microsoft doing its best to keep pace, and the Wii U still a relative non-factor outside of Japan. Going forward, the question remains whether Microsoft will maintain or narrow the sales gap it suffers behind the PS4 or whether Sony will be able to extend its relative sales lead to become the de facto system of choice on the market.