PS4 Is Having A Huge Year So Far

Sony's PlayStation 4 has been selling like hot cakes all year long. According to recent reports the console has managed to move 11.7 million units throughout the past year, and it has culminated in an install base that is 30.2 million units strong as of November, 2015.

PSU.com does a breakdown of the numbers that Sony released, revealing that the home console has been moving a lot of units throughout this past year in very quick succession. In fact, there was only one month where the PS4 did not reign supreme and that was during October.

So what happened in October? Well, combining Microsoft's steep discounts on the Xbox One with the highly anticipated release of Halo 5: Guardians, which dropped on October 27th. The release of Microsoft and 343 Industries' latest title in the long running Halo franchise culminated in a game that wasn't quite as big as previous games in the series but was big enough to move some serious units. Microsoft throwing their marketing weight around also helped, as the Xbox One took the win for the October NPD figures, but not by much. It had a moderate lead on the PS4 by moving over 25,000 SKUs.

The thing is, Sony hasn't been pumping out many AAA first-party titles this year, especially after Bloodborne dropped. They've had a consistent supply of indie titles and HD remasters, of course the HD remasters are just supplemental hold-overs until bigger and better titles release. That's partially the reason why the PS4 lost in October since the only thing they had was the Uncharted: Nathan Drake Collection and most people who own a PS3 and PS4 already own Uncharted. It was a great introductory bundle package for people new to the PlayStation brand, but it wasn't the sort of thing anyone was really dying to run out and buy.

Nevertheless, the PlayStation 4 has consistently been selling and managed to maintain that momentum moving out of the launch period after Microsoft supplied them with their greatest ammunition and marketing material, notably the “How to share a game” schtick that went viral since sharing games on the PS4 was as simple as handing a friend the disc and playing it on another system.

The “pro-consumer” approach worked wonders and the system hasn't stopped being a cornerstone middle-finger purchase against Microsoft ever since. In a way, you could say even with the PS4's strikingly barren supply of original and big budget AAA exclusives, a lot of people are buying the system as a protest purchase.

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To be fair, Microsoft's Phil Spencer and the rest of the team have performed a complete 180 on the Xbox One and have managed to get the system back into the spotlight and back into the good graces of the Xbox community. People still see it as underpowered and weak compared to the PS4, but at least the pro-consumer approach has come back under Spencer's guidance.

Even still, the turnaround by Microsoft wasn't enough to topple the giant that is the PlayStation 4, and Sony is already set to outpace the sales of the PlayStation 2 during the same time period. With the launch of Uncharted 4 and other big AAA titles in 2016, it's not an impossibility that the PS4 could be Sony's biggest selling system yet.