Buy a New Game System on Black Friday / Cyber Monday? You Weren't Alone

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
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Buy a New Game System on Black Friday / Cyber Monday? You Weren't Alone

While the battle between Microsoft and Sony for sales dominance has been ongoing for years now, Black Friday generated good news for both sides. The ongoing battle shows no signs of stopping, but a new report suggests Black Friday was a great day for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 sales.

Word from Adobe puts the two gaming systems in the top five best-sellers for electronic devices, in the same league as the iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini, as well as Samsung's 4K television lineup. Moreover, the PS4 release of NBA 2K16 was actually considered one of the five products most likely to sell out this year, matching such household names as the Beats headphones or the Amazon Fire tablet. That's a big step, and underscores Sony's comparative dominance in the field.

Such sales were projected to continue through Cyber Monday and beyond, as the systems were both discounted along with a host of games for each console. In fact, sales are so strong for both sides that it makes me wonder: what if we're setting up for not a clear winner in the console market, but a market where both sides are approximately equal in representation?

We've seen for sometime now that both sides of the equation have had strong sales for months now, even years. There is, therefore, a likelihood of overlap as households settle not into Xbox One or PlayStation 4 households, but rather gamer households where both languages are spoken and the various exclusives for each side are enjoyed with equal aplomb. It could be that the days of the console war may be coming to an end, with users eventually going to take up both sides anyway, the only real difference between the two being which will be a priority day-one purchase and which will be a wait-til-later purchase of a discounted new or further discounted used system. That alone might get us to the point where there are no console wars any longer, and gamers participate in a universal pool on a universal system.

Maybe that's too idealized, but it's certainly not out of line. We could be looking at a whole new world to come in gaming, and it may not look much like the one we knew before. There's already plenty of intermingling between the two game systems' pools, and the idea that there could be more such pooling to the point where the two markets demand a common platform isn't out of line.


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