In EA’s earnings call yesterday, CFO Blake Jorgensen said combined sales of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were at 79 million at the end of calendar year 2016. At the end of this calendar year, EA expects “sales of current generation consoles to continue to be strong, with the installed base growing to 105 million consoles.” This number only applies to PS4 and Xbox One, and doesn’t include Nintendo Switch.
Lifetime PS4 sales were at 53 million at the end of 2016, so if EA’s estimate is correct, lifetime Xbox One sales were at 26 million. Since Sony expects to have sold roughly 75 million PS4s by the end of 2017, this would place Xbox One around 30 million.
Later, Jorgensen said they think 2017 will end with more than 40% of console game sales in the industry coming digitally:
In terms of full-game downloads… The number surprised us because we had thought that it’d be around the 5% year-over-year growth. Some of that may simply be the consumer is shifting faster than we know or we expected. The trends can sometimes jump in dramatic ways and maybe we’re starting to see that overall shift. And some of it could be product-related. We do think the industry will end calendar year 2017 probably above 40%. We will most likely lag that as we have historically because FIFA is such a large product and it is so global that we are operating in markets where either the ability to purchase digitally, or the ability to download based on bandwidth speeds, are compromised and thus we tend to skew a little lower on FIFA than we do on the rest of our portfolio. So we’ve always lagged the industry slightly, but we are excited about the potential that you’re seeing the consumer possibly shift quicker to digital than we’d originally anticipated.
Do you think PS4 and Xbox One sales will reach 105 million this year?
[Source: Seeking Alpha via Eurogamer]
