there's something else I want to ask you. according to
this guy the lead in the U.S is be only 500k, and my response to that was... so even after leading hardware sales for 9+ months in the states, sony is already that close to losing the lead to mS? that either means the monthly sales gaps weren't huge, or the xbone sold PHENOMENALLY better than the Ps4 the last 2 months.
The latter, sorta.
At the end of 2013, Sony's US lead was less than 200k, and closer to 100k, I think. By October, that lead had grown to about 1M units. Microsoft's big sale gave them a 400k advantage in November (1.2M/800k), closing the gap to about 600k, which was certainly huge for them. If the gap is now at 500k, that would indicate a 100k lead for MS in December, which is decidedly less huge.
So yeah, MS made up fairly significant ground in the final two months, but that doesn't really put them in position to overtake Sony in the near future, even at $350, simply because a comparatively low volume of units are sold during these months. Plus, Sony have a lot of fairly big games coming out in the next few months, while MS don't seem to have much going on until the fall. Anyway, "off-season" sales are usually in the 200k range; sometimes a bit more, and often less. Therefore, there's really no opportunity for MS to outsell Sony by 400k in a single month. That opportunity won't come around again until Christmas.
Also, if the monthly gap really did shrink from 400k to 100k Nov->Dec, that would seem to indicate that XB3 sales had already started to lose momentum, despite the continued discounts. That would line up with some of the retail anecdotes we heard of heavy stocks of XB3 going in to the new year, though the heavy stocks may indicate stuffing rather than stalled demand; likely a combination of both, I'd guess. The other possibility would be that Sony gained some momentum, but apart from some scattered deals here and there, they didn't really seem to do much with would increase their demand in any significant way. Yes, their sales increased Nov->Dec, but that's fairly typical. My understanding is that XB3 sales were comparatively flat month over month, which again would seem to indicate they weren't really able to sustain that initial demand throughout the holiday.
All of that said, I'm not really sure what the actual NPD results were — either for Nov or Dec — so this analysis is based entirely on the claimed 500k gap.
If anyone wants to PM me the actual numbers, that would be lovely. <3
Edit: Oh, and regarding the monthly gaps through October, PS4 was outselling XB3 like 3:2 to 2:1. But it still took 10 months to add 800k-900k to their lead. That's what I meant by MS not really being poised to take over. Even if they outsell Sony 2:1 every month, it'll still be several months before they actually close the LTD gap.