Looking to squeeze every last drop from an existing generation of consoles, both Microsoft and Sony released minor upgrades leading up to Black Friday in an effort to win the all-important holiday shopping weekend. Xbox trimmed down the device itself while adding support for HDR gaming and Ultra HD Blu-ray players, coining their new console the Xbox One S. PlayStation followed suit on aesthetics, offering the PlayStation 4 Slim with a sleeker design. Sony also looked to capitalize on the 4k TV trend with the November release of the PlayStation 4 Pro, offering enhanced hardware performance and support for 4k streaming.

Driven primarily by a discount at Target for the PlayStation 4 Uncharted Bundle ($212), Sony won the war of the shelves for the 2016 Black Friday Weekend.

But when it came to online shopping, the storyline was different. The appetite grew beyond the base 500GB models with the Xbox 1TB Battlefield Bundle, which was marked down to $299 from $349 at major e-tailers, garnering an 18% market share.

Did the push by both Sony and Microsoft to slim down and enhance the aesthetic appeal of the console have an influence? According to our survey to 300+ console purchasers on Black Friday, not so much. Less than 8% of respondents cited exterior console design as an influencing factor for their purchase.

While PlayStation4 buyers had few console+game bundles to choose from, namely the Uncharted 4 Bundle, Xbox had a wider variety (Battlefield, Gears of War, Minecraft). This appeared to bolster sales as Xbox buyers cited the bundled game as a influencing factor in their console decision.

Stay tuned for our breakdown of the top games from Black Friday 2016!

About the Data

The data in this article was sourced from over 1.2m transcribed brick-and-mortar and online receipts on Black Friday weekend from Thursday evening to Sunday night. This included over 1,500 gaming console purchases at major brick-and-mortar retailers and major online e-tailers. The 2016 analysis was limited to Xbox and PlayStation, purchases including the Nintendo WII and 3DS were not included. 

Throughout the 2016 holiday shopping season, InfoScout’s team of researchers will be analyzing real-time data from millions of omnichannel shopping trips. This data is mapped to shopper profile data, instantly triggered surveys and more to provide the richest set of shopper insights available.

For more information, please contact press@infoscoutinc.com.