14 DAY TRIAL // The console war has been going for quite some time and, if we take a look at the current state of mind of quite a lot of executives from the three major manufacturers, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, things will stay that way in the future, with statements cleverly aimed at rivals bound to appear.
Microsoft has recently expressed its opinion through Chris Lewis, the vice president of Interactive Entertainment for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, who stated that the Xbox 360 was definitely ahead of its archrival the PlayStation 3 by almost 1 million units. While the GfK Chart-Track statistics cited by Lewis are valid, let's not forget that Sony uses a different region category, which also includes Australia and New Zealand in its PAL region, so the numbers may not be so different.
“There has been some confusion, but I'm not confused,” he said. “Let me say we're confident that we talk about numbers that are meaningful customer numbers, whether they be GfK- or Chart-Track-generated, or otherwise, but they are numbers about shipments into the market, numbers that represent our performance in Europe, the Middle East and Africa - they're not PAL territories in totality, so the numbers I talk about don't include Australia and New Zealand for instance. If you look right across my area of responsibility, every data point that I've got, which I trust - and data points we've always used - put us approximately 1 million units ahead in the aggregate.”
But these aren't fighting words, as Lewis wanted to emphasize, because the two companies do respect each other, forgetting the recent statement war between Sony's Kaz Hirai and Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg on the leaders of the console generation. “It's not about us necessarily fixating on Sony - we like a target to run at, and a barometer of success, and we see Sony most closely aligned to our own platform,” said Lewis.
As long as we still have consoles, such wars based on charts and sales will still happen. Hopefully, the executives will just leave the numbers do the talking in the future.