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[sphinx]

I think most of the optimism about XBone's performance comes from the fact that they've only trailed Sony slightly in NPD, and people mistakenly assume results are similar outside the US.

However, I suspect that in a few hours we'll learn the only reason XBone sorta kept up in the US for a while was thanks to a substantial Titanfall bump which has since passed. I think there will be a lot less optimism once we have all of the Q2 NPD results.

wow, today is NPD day?? I honestly forgot, cool.

 

[TheSlySoul]

Both systems had successful launches and failing to pick up traction after the holidays. The issue is Wii U did not change that much during the holiday. Xbox One could build the hype again in the holiday if given the right circumstance.

I would say the Wii U is in more trouble because by now it should have sold 9 million when it has only done 5.5 million. Xbox One will probably get 8 million at the end of the year if they can gain holiday hype. PS4 has been steady since launch, so that is why people are calling doom and gloom for the other two systems.

 

[airmangataosenai]

By the way, if you combine all shipments from all quarters outside of the October-December holiday season to date, constituting 12 full months of data, it's still less than what the XBO shipped last quarter.

 

[Liabe Brave]

I wished we could have some worldwide numbers or at least estimates to see what happens. Who near or far they are from each other.

Well, we can come up with a decent estimate at least. First, the launch-aligned worldwide shipment figures:

Wii U Shipments to Retailers:
4 months, 14 days - March 31st, 2013: 3.45 million

Xbox One Shipments to Retailers:
4 months, 10 days - March 31st, 2014: 5.1 million shipped

Now, the sales to consumers for the U.S. alone in that same period:

Xbox One [NPD through March 2014]
LTD: 2.53 million

Wii U [NPD through March 2013]
LTD (at that point): 1.08 million

So we can see that Xbox One has sold 1.45m more consoles in the U.S. than Wii U did in the same period. But if you look back at the first set of numbers, you'll note that worldwide, they've only shipped 1.65m more consoles than Wii U did. In other words, it seems that outside the U.S. Xbox One sales to consumers are at best only 200k units ahead of Wii U launch-aligned. (This is the maximum possible gap--if any of those 200k units are shipped but unsold, the true difference is lower.)

But this is misleading, because Wii U launched in more markets than Xbox One. So we have to increase the gap, either by adding the hypothetical number of Xbox Ones that will be sold in the first 4.5 months when it finally releases in those countries, or alternately by subtracting how many units Nintendo did sell in them. We'd essentially just be guessing at the former number, but we can make a better-supported initial stab at the second.

Wii U's biggest unopposed market, Japan, is known. By the end of March 2013, Nintendo had sold to consumers ~861k units. This gets our "Outside the U.S. and Japan" sales gap to ~1m in favor of Xbox One. But there's still more Wii U-but-not-Xbox countries that would also add to the total. These are individually pretty small markets, but summed up they'd have a non-negligible effect on our estimate. Unfortunately, the remaining regions are mostly black boxes, with no country-by-country breakdown available to us. All we can say is that the final number will be higher than ~1m.

To sum up (all launch-aligned):

Outside the U.S. and Japan, Xbox One has outsold Wii U by more than 1m units.
- In the U.S., they're beating Wii U by ~1.5m, a very large margin
- In Japan, they're losing by ~860k, a very large margin (due to not launching yet)
- In some countries, they're losing by small margins (due to not launching yet)
- Where they've launched, they generally have beaten Wii U by small margins

 

[PeakPointMatrix]

Is there a site or web page that has all of these hard sale numbers in one place? I can never seem to track them down from one location.

 

[Nemo]

It's basically the same thing as the Nintendo DS vs PSP situation. The PSP always had the stigma that it was a massive market failure. It, in fact, sold a tremendous amount of units and was by far the best selling non-Nintendo handheld. The stigma was only there because the DS was an unprecedented success, but the gaming masses were convinced the PSP was a failure in absolute terms, not just relative ones.

PSP was a great success (except for maybe software sales, 300M vs DS's close to a billion), never really saw the move from Sony to distance themselves from the PSP and bringing the Vita