Soundwave said:
Right now I would say no question, XBox One S has had an incredibly positive effect on the XBox One sales, meanwhile Sony is down YoY in December despite having a new model AND a new revision.
Was it the XB1 S or the steady release of new bundles that provided a boost? Because here was Microsoft's release schedule starting from August:
Aug 2 - 2TB XBO S Aug 23 - 1TB Madden 17 bundle, 500GB Halo Collection bundle Sep 27 - 500GB Minecraft bundle Oct 11 - 1TB Gears 4 bundle, 2TB Gears 4 LE bundle Oct 18 - Battlefield 1 special edition bundle Oct 21 - 500GB Battlefield 1 bundle Nov 1 - 500GB Gears 4 deep blue bundle
By spacing out the releases like this plus selling the Minecraft bundle at $225 last month, Microsoft was able to temporarily increase the baseline for 5 months.
To me that suggests the One S is taking away sales from Sony, because there is no way the PS4 should be down YoY for December. Even November should not have been close but from the leaked numbers we got November was extremely competetive with a razor thin difference.
No way the PS4 should be down YOY for December? If you looked at what Sony released December 2015, then the YOY decrease should be surprising to absolutely no one. Sony released three different Star Wars Battlefront bundles. The Black Ops 3 standard bundle was released December 14, 2015 whereas the Infinite Warfare bundle was released on the last week of December 2016. By the time the Infinite Warfare bundle came out, the holiday shopping has already died down.
I call out PR spin as much as anyone on this board, but in this case MS does have the right to crow a bit. They definitely are doing *way* better and certainly overperformed expectations this year in the US market. Everyone and their grandma was saying once PS4 Pro + Slim came out that PS4 would go back to dominating the XBox One in the US ... that doesn't look like it's happening.
The XB1's performance, while impressive, is not as good as you're making it out to be. If it managed to sell this much with less bundles and at price parity in December, then I would wholly agree with you. However, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that. Microsoft released 9 new SKUs from August through November. Each SKU is like the mushroom in Mario Kart. Now all those mushrooms have been used up, can the XB1 maintain a high baseline from January to Scorpio's release?
|