During the peak sales period of Amazon, both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 managed to sell more than 1,000 units per minute. It's not quite as high as their pre-order sell-rate, which was 2,500 units per minute, but both Microsoft and Sony are showing that home consoles are here to stay.
There has been a lot of doom and gloom talk lately from a number of pundits, analysts and soap-box warriors talking down the prestige and presence of home console gaming. They've been saying that this will probably be the final generation of home consoles and that smartphones and tablets have superseded the big box, television and controller combination, as noted on sites like CNN and The Economist. Well, I guess they can take the Amazon numbers and put it in the pipe to replace the crack they've been smoking, because it doesn't look like home console gaming is going anywhere (at the moment).
Gamespot rolled out the news that Amazon revealed their stats over the weekend, including moving more than 36.8 million items that shoppers ordered at a pace of 426 items per second.
According to the stats from earlier in the month, both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 have moved more than two million SKUs. However, if you check the charts at VGChartz, you'll see that the PlayStation 4 is on pace to out-moving the Xbox One by nearly 700,000 SKUs. This is on pace to what some analysts had mentioned prior, where they stated that the PS4 would outsell the Xbox One by more than 50%.
The NPD results have largely kept both consoles within reasonable pace of one another, given that analysts also believed that the Xbox One would have a stronger base in North America than the PlayStation 4, as reported by IGN.
However, the Xbox One only launched in 13 territories, where-as the PlayStation 4 has managed to land in more than 48 countries. Hence, Sony is having a harder time keeping the PS4 in ample supply compared to their competitor, as noted by retailers and eBay reports that the PlayStation 4 is constantly out of stock the world around.
Some conspiracy theorists believe that Sony's constrained supply chain has dampened their overall sales momentum, and that Microsoft's ability to keep more Xbox One units in stock has enabled them to surpass Sony in sales. Still, it would seem unlikely that the Xbox One and PS4's near even pace in North America and the PS4's added sales data in the regions where the Xbox One isn't made available would somehow give Microsoft the advantage. If the PS4 has already moved -- according to recorded NPD data -- 100,000 more units than the Xbox One in North America, one would imagine that the added sales from countries where the PS4 is sold and the Xbox One is not, would put Sony squarely in the lead. However, we'll know for sure when more concrete numbers are released for the worldwide sales data.
2014 will definitely get off to a big start once the numbers continue to roll in and we find out exactly how each system is performing. Sony is expected to take a strong lead come February, however, once the PlayStation 4 launches in Japan.
(Main image courtesy of Gameslean.tv)
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