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Forums - Sales Discussion - 2020 Market Share data according to Forbes.

chakkra on 16 January 2021

I have no idea how reliable Forbes can be. Does anyone here know?

Anyway, they claim the PS5 grabbed a 65.05% market share worldwide against 34.94% on the Series X/S.

Another interesting thing is that they claim the Xbox market share has actually been growing in the last couple of years.
"By the end of the year, the PS5 took 65% of the worldwide market share, while the Xbox grabbed 35%... However, this market share gap could tighten in the coming months and years. GamingSmart’s research found that in 2018, Xbox had just 25.3% of the console market; in 2019, this rose to 37.4%; over the entirety of 2020, Microsoft took an average of 39.3%."

Does anyone have any idea how reliable this could be?

Source: PS5 Wins 2020 Market War-But Not In The U.S.

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IcaroRibeiro on 16 January 2021

Looks like a very biased article made only for the sake of painting Microsoft in the best possible light despite its defeat and launch down to almost half million compared to XBOne 

It highlights a very neglible PS5 defeat by mere 0.4% in USA market and classify markets such as Hungary, Afghanistan and Belarus as "big hitters" only because Series X/S sold more copies than PS5 

It also shamelessly push a meaningless statistics of MS market share using Xbone and PS4 numbers (and ignored 2020 for some obscure reason, using only PS5 and Series SX as if last gen consoles dissapeared from earth) to paint a progressive increase on Microsft market share suggesting this trend is likely to be repeated in 2021

VG Charts members should submit articles to Forbes, I'm sure people here can come with something better 



chakkra on 16 January 2021
RolStoppable said:

Aside from their own work, Forbes has contributors whose articles and opinion pieces are not reflective of Forbes itself. What you have on your hands here is an article by a contributor, so the question of reliability concerns only this particular contributor. Not that it matters, because he is relaying stats compiled by GamingSmart, so the real question is how credible that website is.

It always raises eyebrows when a website pretends that the console market consists of only PS and Xbox. But anyway, their methodology is a mixture of numbers by Statcounter, VGChartz and Google Trends; the latter means that number of searches went into the GamingSmart results which isn't a good indicator for actual sales. But this explains how Microsoft's share could rise during years where we know that it has gone down due to the estimates we have on this website here; VGChartz cross-checks their own estimates with data of official sales trackers and tidbits by analysts who have access to such sales data, so they are quite accurate over time.

GamingSmart's methodology is very much questionable, hence why their stats have to be dismissed. Some of their numbers can be close to reality, but they are playing a game of chance where they are bound to get something right every now and then.

I see...  thanks for the input.