Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving Day, is widely regarded as the start of the American Christmas shopping season. It is one of the busiest shopping days of the year and sees retailers helping to drive sales with lots of special offers. Being a big consumer shopping event it is also one of those times of the year when the console makers like to produce figures to show how well they are doing. In the last couple of years Microsoft have taken the opportunity to boast about how much better the 360 has been selling than the PS3, while Sony have remained tight-lipped on PS3 sales.
That has changed this year though. “The 2009 holiday season got off to an amazing start for PlayStation,” said Patrick Seybold, Sony’s Senior Corporate Communications director, “with all key retailers showing a significant increase for PS3, PSP and key holiday titles over Black Friday and the holiday weekend.”
Weekly sales for the PS3 reached “an all time high” with 440,000 being sold which is almost 120,000 more than were sold during all of October. Seybold’s statement continues, “In today’s economy, consumers are drawn to items that offer the most value for their money, making the PS3 an ideal choice for those who want a comprehensive gaming and entertainment system all in one package.”
In the last two years Microsoft have proudly claimed that the 360 outsold the PS3 by two to one, 2007, and by three to one, 2008. All we have heard from them so far this year, via a tweet from Aaron Greenburg, is that the 360 has had its “biggest sales week of the year” during which it sold “more than [twice the] previous week sales”.
We are still waiting to hear actual numbers from Microsoft but if we estimate using figures from VGChartz, which puts 360 sales at just under 150,000 for the week ending 21st November, then we can expect that the 360 saw sales of over 300,000. You can speculate for yourselves as to whether Greenburg’s choice of “more than 2xs previous week sales” means that 360 lost out to PS3 during the week as the 360 would have had to sell more than three times the previous week’s sales to win the fight.
Neither Microsoft or Sony, based on what we know so far, have managed to win the home console sales crown for the week though. That laurel rests once more upon the head of Nintendo as sales for the Wii were more than 550,000 according to Nintendo’s own “internal tracking numbers”. Impressive but significantly down on the 800,000 sales it recorded in Black Friday week last year. At the moment it appears that of the home consoles only the PS3 actually improved on last year’s sales.