When talking about video game sales, it’s important to understand not only the nature of sales themselves but also the regions they’re coming from and how they compare to the previous item that came before them or something of a similar nature. With gaming consoles, the question is always how they stack up to one another and how they stack to the previous generation. That brings us to the latest NPD data from the United States, where the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are in very different places right now, and that’s not exactly a good thing for either brand when you break it all down.
In a massive thread on Blue Sky, industry analyst Mat Piscatella broke down several elements of the gaming year, including the sales of the main trio of consoles and their main games. To that end, he broke down how the Sony and Microsoft systems were doing compared to their predecessors:
“Through each console’s first 50 months in the US market (life to date ending Dec 2024 for both XBS and PS5), PS5 lifetime unit sales are 7% ahead of PS4’s pace, while Xbox Series trails Xbox One by 18%.”
On the surface, that seems good for Sony and bad for Microsoft. However, when you add that to another post from Mat in this thread, you’ll see that spending on consoles dropped heavily over the last year for all three brands:
On one hand, this partially makes sense, as the Nintendo Switch is in its transition period to the Switch 2, which has already dominated the news cycle ever since it was revealed last week. However, for Sony and Microsoft, seeing that kind of drop is not just bad; it speaks to the various problems the two are having.
For Sony, it’s more focused on the hardware side of things than the software side of things. It’s had numerous live-action failures and cancelations recently, and the big AAA titles they do release for the PS5 haven’t exactly sold the best as you would expect.
Meanwhile, the Xbox Series X/S continues to meander in various ways, including being unable to keep its exclusives! There are even rumors that multiple key Xbox exclusive franchises may be heading to Nintendo and Sony platforms in the future.
As gamers will happily tell you, there’s very little reason to have an Xbox right now outside of maybe Game Pass, and even that has issues. Thus, it’ll be interesting to see how sales go for these two brands in 2025.
