Even as the consoles sales war continues to get more and more specific this generation, hard numbers remain a bit hard to come by- while Sony continues to trumpet sales for the PS4 at every chance that it gets, it also studiously refuses to mention numbers for PS3 and PlayStation Vita. Microsoft has taken to Sony’s former practice of combining numbers of Xbox 360 and Xbox One to mask the true sales performance of their newest console; only Nintendo provides total and exact numbers for each of their SKU, but their console is so low selling that it is irrelevant to the larger scheme of things.
Well, for you games economists, Take-Two has come to the rescue. In an investors meeting, Take-Two confirmed that the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 have collectively sold 34 million units worldwide, as of March 31 2015. Given that we know PS4’s numbers for the period, we can assume Xbox One to be at roughly 12 million units worldwide.
Those numbers sound good (on the whole, it’s hard to think that Microsoft will be happy with them), but Take Two’s prediction of 50 million units worldwide by the end of this year sounds even better. Curiously enough, their prediction for the overall health of this generation sounds muted- they project only 110 million units sold collectively by 2019, which would represent an almost catastrophic collapse from the previous generation’s total of 265 million units worldwide. Even if one were to assume that the Wii U doubled its total install base, and then included those in the tally, we’d only get 130 million units- less than half of where the last generation stands.
On the whole, let’s hope Take-Two’s numbers aren’t the closest to reality, especially as far as their predictions for the future go.