Report: PS4 Outsold Xbox One by at Least 40% Worldwide

Folks over at Ars Technica have done a little bit of number-crunching to try and estimate exactly how much Sony’s PlayStation 4 has outsold the Xbox One worldwide. Bear in mind that these figures are merely estimates that came as a result of an analysis, and do not indicate actual sales. But if Ars Technica’s report is anything to go by, then we’re looking at a difference of about 40 percent. According to the report:

Determining those ratios was not a simple process. As a starting point, we used Microsoft’s announcement that it had shipped five million units of the Xbox One as of mid-April. Since then, the company has only released quarterly reports on how many total Xbox systems have shipped, lumping the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One together, which obscures the new console’s true market performance.

For the PlayStation 4, the estimation process is a little simpler. Sony announced on August 12 that it had sold 10 million PS4 units through to consumers worldwide. That announcement came 130 days after the company announced seven million sales, meaning Sony had sold an average of just over 23,000 PS4 units a day in the intervening period.

Even assuming PS4 sales absolutely cratered after that, selling half as quickly, Sony would still have sold about 560,000 additional PS4 units in the 49 days from August 12 to the end of September. Add that, and we get a floor of about 10.56 million PS4s sold through the end of September, compared to a ceiling of about 7.42 million Xbox One units sold by the same time.

Dividing these numbers led the team to arrive at a figure of 42 percent. In other words, the PS4 roughly outsold the Xbox One by at least 40 percent. Ars Technica points out that the assumptions made in the report are actually pretty generous when it comes to the Xbox One, and quite pessimistic for the PS4. Therefore, the actual ratio by which the PS4 is outselling the Xbox One worldwide could be pretty damning for Microsoft. 

Interesting figures, nonetheless. 

[Source: Ars Technica]

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