14 DAY TRIAL // The PlayStation 4 continues its soar, with the latest information revealing that Sony's growing baby is also outselling the Xbox One at a 3:1 ratio in Germany.
Media Control GfK has revealed how well the major consoles are selling in Germany, offering a better picture of the information provided by both Sony and Microsoft's latest financial reports, placing the number of Xbox One and Xbox 360 consoles shipped during the last quarter at 1.1 million, while the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 are reported to have sold around 3.5 million in total.
The figures are telling by themselves, but it's always good to get additional information that can paint a better picture than simple broad aggregates, the latest of which reveals that Sony's dominance might be a global phenomenon rather than the result of a boom on a couple of markets.
German website Boerse Online has rolled out the Media Control numbers for June 12, revealing that the PlayStation 4 sold 540k units, as opposed to the Xbox One, who only managed to sell 170k units in the country since launch. The situation also translates into last-gen consoles, as the numbers point to a total of 4.2 million PlayStation 3 computer entertainment systems sold in Germany, as opposed to just 2.1 million Xbox 360 devices.
GfK is the European equivalent of the NPD Group, and has the same reputation for accurate numbers that the North American analyst has, with only a slight margin for error.
The current worldwide estimates place the PlayStation 4 at nine million units sold, meaning that Germany is a strong supporter, with around 6 percent of the company's total sales, and only accounting for about 3.4 percent of the Xbox One's last known sales figure of five million.
This is especially telling since in Germany, the PlayStation 4 is currently priced at 395 Euros, while the Kinect-less Xbox One variant is going for 373 Euros, giving Microsoft a slight price advantage in the country.
Even more, Amazon Germany currently has no Xbox One accessories on its best-sellers list. One of the reasons this might be is the fallout from the Xbox One's initial reveal, all the way back to Don Mattrick's original policies for the next-gen console.
Boerse makes note of the fact that consumer trends for the Xbox One are most likely tied to the fears that sparked last year, when Germany's Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar called Kinect 2.0 a "twisted nightmare" after Microsoft revealed that it would be always-on, snooping in the dark with its infrared sensor and listening to your conversations.
This, along with the mandatory daily authentication, led users to fear that the measures, which have been since dropped due to the negative public reaction, could be reinstated at a later date, once enough people would buy the device and invest in peripherals and games.