mikolas

Xbox 360 Outsells Playstation 3 – Or Then Again Not

According to PCWorld, Xbox 360 is outselling PS3. The current sales figures they quote (Microsoft) are 28 million for Xbox, while PS3 has sold, depending on the source, 20-25 million since launch. What the reporter, once again, accidentally forgets is the fact that Xbox 360 launched one year earlier than PS3. By my math, this makes overall yearly sales of 9.3 million units for Xbox 360, while PS3 has sold at least 10 million units per year.

Also, these figures have some additional skew, since the return rate of Xbox 360 has been, according to some sources, as high as 33% in the early life of the console. I repeat, 33%. The return rate of PS3, according to retailers, has been around 1% (with some reports referring return rate of 0.2%). So if you add all this up, actually PS3 has been performing better than Xbox 360 both based on pure numbers, but also in terms active consoles due to the marginal return rate. Remember, sales figures normally quote the number units that have been put into the distribution channel.

While I own a PS3 as it makes a good Blu-ray player and DLNA client, I have no preference whatsoever regarding which console performs better in terms of sales. However, I find it very annoying that people who are paid for doing their job, can not even perform the simplest math and are making big headlines with information that is either intentionally biased or simply overlooked.