The gaming industry is booming and Sony's lead is growing
Earlier this week Sony announced that it'd sold over 10 million PlayStation 4s to date, but that isn't the half of it: the company's latest gaming console is once again dominating the sales charts overall. As Sony tells it, July marks the seventh consecutive month that the PS4 outsold Microsoft's Xbox One. Hardware isn't the only area Sony is trumping its rival either, as The Last of Us: Remastered led software sales last month by a "considerable" margin ahead of number-two-seller Minecraft on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The gaming sector as a whole is incredibly healthy, too. The NPD Group reports that even though software sales are down overall for July (something it attributes directly to the lack of an NCAA Football release this year), hardware is picking up the slack. Comparing life-to-date numbers of the PS4 and Xbox One to their predecessors, the new consoles are outselling the PS3 and Xbox 360 by almost a whopping 80 percent. That puts this July ahead of last by 13 percent in terms of total money spent in the area, according to NPD.
Nintendo seems to be doing pretty well, too, despite that massive $97 million loss. The outfit says that Mario Kart 8 has now sold over a million copies in the US alone, and the Wii U has increased year-to-date sales by 60 percent compared to 2013.
What about Microsoft? Well, Redmond's lack of a formal announcement should speak for itself. When we reached out for a comment, a company spokesperson reminded us that the Xbox One sales numbers more-than doubled in June (still no word on what they doubled from) and that "this momentum" continued into July. And, well, that's about it. When you look at how many Xbox One software-bundled systems that Microsoft is releasing this fall, just how far behind the company is to its main competition (Sony) should be pretty apparent -- the firm's desperate and essentially giving away some of its biggest games in the hopes that people will buy an Xbox One.
