| Aerys said: You need to calm down. The ratio cant be higher than 2:1 Xbone will surely sell at least 70M, and PS4 can reach 140M |
I disagree, the ration could easily go higher.
With only the North American market proping up the Xbone, I don't see it topping 50m lifetime sales. Seriously. Look at the Xbox 360, in North America it sold 42.4m units so far, since launch. Considering that Europe has practically abandoned the Xbone at this point, and you can't give Microsoft consoles away in Japan, I don't see how the Xbone will outperform it's predecessor; especially with PS4 outselling it uniformly (remember PS3 only sold 25.8m in North America). If these figures are representative of the North American market buying power, and they flip this generation (which is entirely likely). The Xbone may genuinely struggle to top more than 30m sales in North America, and I don't see it selling more than a couple of million across other nations.
Regardless, we can already see that PS4 is doing well, and assuming a continue in trend it's entirely reasonable to predict the PS4 will top 150m sales worldwide over it's lifetime. I won't be shocked if it breaks the record for best selling console of all time. Europe is likely to become a monopoly for the PS4 (excepting handheld sales obviously), Japan and North America will both support it greatly. It's sold well across 10 other countries already including Malasia, Taiwan, Saudi-Arabia, Australia, South Africa and more... AND it's opening up entirely new markets with India, Philippines, and Thailand all being tackled with nation-wide releases for the first time from a games console developer. If Sony can secure more exclusives in 2015-2016 following a poor Xbox One performance, it's entirely within the realms of possibility that this console could break the 200 million units milestone.
While this is good news for Sony, it's actually bad news in some respects. Having Sony in such a powerful position, and with the Wii U and Xbox One both likely to struggle to surpass 50m sales, it will shift the balance of power far too much. No one company should have too much influence, or shady practices, and anti-consumer efforts start to rise up. Competition is a good thing, we want to keep Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo fighting each other as it ensures a strong industry with good innovation. The day one console wins outright, is the day we see true stagnation in gaming.
