Soundwave said:
There were discounts on PS4s at places too, so that's not a one way street. XBox should not have been even close to Sony this month, the whole line of reasoning we've heard the last 5-6 months is PS4 sales have been held down by people waiting for the PS4 Pro, but that doesn't look like the case to me. |
It's not a one way street, but was obvious which company was the more aggressive of the two. It wasn't just discounts, but also the availability of different XBO bundles while there was only one bundle for the PS4. The Pro stayed at $399 and when holiday season sales are dictated by price, it wasn't going to sell a whole lot. It did get discounted to $340 because of Target's 15% off everything deal and Amazon's subsequent pricematching, but that happened on Sunday which is the after the last day of the November NPD period.
Plus, Microsoft released another new SKU at the beginning of November: the blue XBO Gears 4 bundle. It was competitively priced and was sold at Gamestop, the biggest video game retailer in the US, so it definitely played a role in preventing the gap from getting bigger than 100K. Other factors such as Battlefield 1 being a really good game while Infinite Warfare greatly underwhelming the audience were out of Sony's (and Microsoft's) control. On top of that, Sony did not release an Infinite Warfare LE bundle this time whereas it did for Black Ops 3 last November.
Overall, it really isn't that surprising how small the gap was. SIEA seemed to be more focused on maximizing revenue (keeping the Pro at full price through BF and selling only one bundle in which the bundled game is 1st party). Microsoft was clearly the more aggressive company because of the plethora of deals and bundles for consumers to choose from.
