By now you have read the news about the PlayStation 4 being the best selling console in November and selling over 1 million consoles in 24 hours in North America alone, also becoming the best selling new console of all time.
You probably also got wind of the Xbox One becoming the fastest selling new console and managing a total of 909,132 in only 18 days. Quite a feat.
Don’t forget Nintendo which managed to sell 770,000 Nintendo 3DSs in addition to increasing WiiU sales by 340% over October – we did not get specific numbers though.
On top of all the hardware sales, the software did extremely well also helping the overall industry sales to jump 7 percent year-over-year. Last year in November the total revenue was $2.5 billion which increased to $2.7 million. Specifically though the hardware jumped about 58 percent to $1.3 billion due to the PS4 and Xbox One launches.
In the end, what this means is the industry is healthy and people want to play good games on good hardware and the sales numbers show exactly that. Gamers cared enough about the offerings to spend 200 Million Dollars more in November than they did last year.
The hardware is great. The games are great. Gaming is great.
Sadly though we will see the message boards light up about one console outselling the other while the other side will argue that their machine sold so much faster. Enthusiasts and fans get so incredibly loyal about their products that they will spend hours upon hours fighting with anonymous fanboys about sales figures and speculate about rumors.
I am growing tired of this – what the latest NPD data should mean is that our industry is healthy and supply is meeting demand to some extent. No longer should we be battling on the illusive battle field that will be the stage of the Next-Gen console war. Even using the word ‘war‘ seems preposterous. Unless by war you mean mostly teenagers yelling at each other about the graphics on level 5 or that there is more RAM in their console.
I do admit, that I am curious to see what the global sell through numbers are for the Xbox One and PS4 at the end of Q4 2013.
After all I have a bet riding on this, losing will land me wearing that bedazzled tiger shirt to work again.
