Sony's PlayStation 4 continues to dominate the sales charts going into the console's third year on the market. Recently crossing 30 million units sold, the PS4 is easily outselling its closest competitor, Microsoft's Xbox One. The latest estimates have PS4 outselling Xbox nearly two-to-one.
Microsoft aimed to change that this holiday season, introducing a number of new console features and releasing high profile, exclusive games just in time for Black Friday. The Xbox One is now backward compatible, with 104 Xbox 360 titles currently playable on the console (and more on the way in the coming months). This fall also saw the launch of two major console exclusives: Halo 5: Guardians and Rise of the Tomb Raider. The Xbox One was the bestselling console of Black Friday 2014, so it stood to reason that with such an incredible lineup, Microsoft was poised for a repeat.
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to stall the momentum of the PlayStation 4. According to a marketing study conducted by Infoscout, PlayStation's percentage share of the console market surged amongst millenial (18-35) consumers, as well as experiencing a modest increase among older (36-55) consumers.
Infoscout tracks the purchases of over 300,000 Americans over three mobile apps. To get these specific numbers, they polled 2,364 people who purchased video games in the month of October, 2015 and established a baseline. This number was then compared to 1,020 people who made video game purchases on Thanksgiving night and Black Friday.
What the data shows is that over the course of Black Friday, PlayStation's percentage of sales among millenials surged upward by 8%, costing Xbox 7% of the market. Among the older consumers, the Xbox and PlayStation both enjoyed slight increases at the expense of Nintendo's market share.
It's important to note that the chart does not differentiate between the current generation and last generation of consoles, combining the data for both. That said, in 2014 the PlayStation 3 made up only 1% of PlayStation sales on Black Friday. Additionally, the PlayStation 4 topped the sales charts for both Amazon and Best Buy this year, so it's a safe bet that the PS4 handily outsold the Xbox One.
This marks the first year since their launch that PlayStation 4 outsold Xbox One on Black Friday. On paper, this holiday should have easily belonged to Microsoft. They had AAA exclusives going into the sales weekend and have made a number of changes to the user interface to address consumer complaints. Even without the big name exclusives, PlayStation came out on top. Sony has a firm grasp on the current market mindshare, especially among younger consumers - enough to boost their sales during one of the biggest shopping days of the year.