Quarterly Report: PlayStation 4 Doubles Xbox, Nintendo Shipments

Another round of quarterly reports and another pretty stellar showing for the PlayStation 4 for Sony’s financials. Microsoft and Nintendo have also reported strong growth from the previous year as more people seem in on advancing to the new generation of consoles from each major manufacturer.

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First, lets begin with the good news from Nintendo’s quarterly report. They are looking at a 20.8% net sales increase from last quarter. We can obviously point largely to Splatoon’s success in this quarter as the reason for this. The game has been a mainstay in the North American NPDs since it launched, which is great for the health of the Wii U.

For sales of the Wii U, Nintendo ended the quarter with over 470,000 units shipped, which while down from last year is still a strong showing without a Nintendo all star in the lineup for this quarter. Again, Splatoon shores up much of that lost demand by being one of the best titles of the year thus far in terms of sales and word of mouth.

Nintendo 3DS also showed growth thanks to the New Nintendo 3DS and New Nintendo 3DS XL.

Next up, Microsoft reported growth of their console business across Xbox One and Xbox 360 platforms in their quarterly report:

"Xbox Platform revenue increased $86 million or 10%, driven by higher volumes of consoles sold, offset in part by lower prices of Xbox Ones sold. We sold 1.4 million consoles in the fourth quarter compared to 1.1 million consoles during the prior year."

From this statement, we can gather a couple things: the price cut from Microsoft has helped the Xbox One strengthen its sales and the proliferation of more Xbox consoles has lead to an uptick in software sales which can also be reflected in the overall revenue of the division. Including a strong showing of first and second party software this Fall, Microsoft should end the year on a really good note for its Xbox division jumping into next year.

Lastly, Sony released their quarterly report latest and here are some things to grab from the report:

"Sales increased 12.1% year-on-year (a 7% increase on a constant currency basis) to 288.6 billion yen (2,365 million U.S. dollars). This significant increase was primarily due to increases in PlayStation 4 (“PS4”) software sales and PS4 peripheral device unit sales as well as the impact of foreign exchange rates.Operating income increased 15.1 billion yen year-on-year to 19.5 billion yen (160 million U.S. dollars). This significant increase was primarily due to PS4 hardware cost reductions, the above-mentioned increases in PS4 software sales and PS4 peripheral device unit sales, partially offset by the negative impact of the appreciation of the U.S. dollar, reflecting the high ratio of U.S. dollar-denominated costs and the decrease in PS3 software sales."

From here we can see a couple things. Sony is doing really well in their gaming division thanks to the success of the PS4. They have reduced their hardware costs so it would seem a price cut or a remodeled PS4 is looming this Fall in North America as has already been announced in other regions.

On top of that, in the larger company report we can see the larger Sony corporate is also still struggling in some areas with legacy deficits, but the company is still strengthening its position as a hardware company with a suite of entertainment service offers. It is worth mentioning because as recently as 2013, the future of Sony as a company was a significantly poor outlook.

According to Game Informer, the PS4 shipped 3 million units this quarter, which is double what Xbox One is reported to have shipped out of the Xbox platform sales share and the reported Nintendo Wii U sales numbers. That is a pretty astronomical figure to consider. Depending on how this fall goes with exclusive content around almost all of the major releases, the PS4 could be looking at worldwide adoption above 30 million consoles in as few as two years. That is truly excellent for a console generation that was starting off with conversations around the “death of console.”

What else do you see in the sales numbers of interest to you? Let us know in the comments!

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