The story of Activision-Blizzard and its 70 billion dollar acquisition by Microsoft continues to provide us with an increasingly complete picture of the competition between some of the most important gaming companies on the market: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, with power relationships that would seem unfavorable for Xbox.
The latest information comes from a official document drawn up by the American Federal Trade Commission, also known as the FTC, following on the heels of recent statements made by Microsoft in defense of the FTC’s allegations. As usual, the introduction of the document in question refers to the whole story that has been going on for several weeks now and which directly involves the green crusade company of Redmond.
However, over the course of the thirty-seven pages that make up the aforementioned document, the sales data reported within it would reveal a very different competitive reality from the one that has been depicted in the previous weeks: the sales data shared in 2021 and relating to the console units sold during that year bring out a clear dominance of the competition.
Indeed, it seems Sony and Nintendo would have sold double and triple the hardware respectively compared to those of the Xbox competition. From the information that emerges, therefore, on the gaming machines front there is a placement and sales of PlayStation and Nintendo Switch consoles that reaches 84%. The same thing applies to the number of exclusive titles released in 2021, even if there is a change in the percentages.
“We know that Nintendo sold over 23 million Switch consoles in 2021. This means that Sony has sold around 15 million consoles and Xbox around 7.5 million. They are only rough estimates”. We cannot know how correct they are for the sale of consoles in the market, also due to the unavailability of exact commercial data. However, the estimate made by the FTC configures a general picture thatat least on the side of gaming machines, comes at the expense of Xbox.
As for the software, PlayStation would be in first place with 50% of the exclusive titles released during that year, followed by Nintendo with 40% and Microsoft with 10%. Also in this case, therefore, the commercial data would not show a clear dominance position of Microsoft towards Sony, as demonstrated by the line-up of first-party productions released exclusively on Xbox.
These data were officially disclosed a few hours after Microsoft’s recent statements about the exclusion agreements made by Sony for some third-party productions that have arrived and are arriving on PlayStation, such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy XVI and more.
