We already knew that both, the Xbox One and the PS4 were successful (both of them have sold at least 10 million within their first year on the market so far), but here’s some context- if you thought last generation’s Xbox 360 and PS3 performed well, the Xbox One and PS4 are apparently outpacing them, according to what leading US games retailer GameStop says.
This information comes to us courtesy of GameStop’s latest quarterly earnings, which reveals that uptake of the Xbox One and PS4 in its sales within the US seems to be 73% higher than the Xbox 360 and PS3 in a similar time period.
Now, this sounds very impressive, and that is because it is, but before we go any further, it is very important to understand that there are some caveats to this data:
- This data is, obviously, limited to just GameStop stores, which make only a fraction of games hardware sales in the US, even if said fraction is appreciably big
- This data is limited only to the US
- This data covers only Xbox and PlayStation consoles, which brings us to the elephant in the room- neither the Xbox 360 nor the PS3 actually had great starts, and the PS3 struggled for a good 2-3 years before its sales really started to take off. Most of the market expansion in the early days of last generation came from the Wii; sales of the Xbox 360 and PS3 were relatively muted for a very long time.
In that context, having outsold those two consoles isn’t all that impressive at all- even though, it is to be remembered, the Xbox One and PS4’s performance is astounding by any reasonable yardstick.
