Xbox One slowly narrows its quarterly sales deficit against the PS4

With Microsoft showing a burst of new sales momentum in the last holiday season following some significant price cuts, there may have been some hope that the Xbox One would be able to finally match or overtake the PS4 in sales when 2015 came around. So far, that has not been the case. Sony's system continues to outsell the Xbox One by a healthy margin on a worldwide basis.

Today's earnings report from Sony mentioned 2.4 million worldwide shipments of the PlayStation 4 for the first quarter of 2015. That number compares quite favorably to Microsoft's earnings last week, which reported 1.6 million sales of all Xbox hardware, including the Xbox 360, during the same period. Using an estimated year-over-year drop-off of 40 to 66 percent for Xbox 360 sales (in line with previous and current console transitions), Microsoft likely pushed out between 1.12 and 1.34 million Xbox One systems from January through March.

Even assuming a healthy 50 percent year-over-year increase in Wii U sales, Nintendo's system doesn't look strong.

(The usual disclaimer about sales vs. shipments here... while the two numbers aren't precisely equivalent, hardware units shipped to stores are usually sold through to consumers in four to six weeks, according to industry analysts. So most units shipped by the end of March have likely been cleared off of store shelves by this point, having little impact on the relative console race. The terms are used interchangeably throughout this piece.)

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