Last month saw the launch of new consoles from both Sony and Microsoft: the PS5 and the Xbox Series X/S, respectively. Despite the pandemic, both companies managed to move their machines to the market, and the PS5 has been setting records in various regions. We now know what they did in France, and they aren’t too far off from what you’d expect, though Sony went up while Microsoft dipped a bit.
As reported by Ludostrie, Sony sold over 107,000 units in the region, which would make it the biggest console launch in French history, managing to just beat the Switch’s previous record of 105,000 and handily was over Sony’s last system, the PS4, which sold 90,000. Microsoft cleared just over 37,000 in the region, which was quite bit down from the Xbox One, which sold around 50,000. The ratio and trend is in line with another European country, Spain, which saw a similar console split as well as Sony up and Microsoft down (big thanks to Juexvideo for the numbers on previous console launches).
The PlayStation brand has traditionally been stronger throughout Europe, so it’s not a huge surprise to see it selling more there in general, and it’s always worth keeping in mind that both systems saw stock and supply issues, this year more so than usual, so the numbers also would maybe be slightly different had this been a normal year, though I imagine the overall ratio split wouldn’t be drastically different.