In an editorial on Friday, I made some comparisons between the Xbox One, which had recently improved its sales by removing Kinect from the initial purchase, and the Wii U, which still requires the purchase of the GamePad at initial buy-in. In response, I had several commenters on Gamer Headlines and elsewhere challenge the comparison, arguing that XBO was also doing poorly and even claiming that it is actually doing worse than the Wii U. Are they right? Which is doing better: Wii U or Xbox One?
To find out, I decided to dig into the numbers. I headed over to VGChartz, who compiles numbers for consoles based on units sold, and started parsing the stats.
Globally, the Wii U has sold 6.7m uints to the XBO’s 5.0m. In terms of raw numbers, yes, the Wii U has more units in homes; but the Wii U also has a full year of sales ahead of the XBO’s release. Parsing these numbers down to sales per month (21 months vs. 9 months), Wii U has been selling about 325,000 units per month, while XBO has been selling 550,000 units per month. If we were to project those numbers out to Wii U’s 21 months, XBO would have sold 11.5m units at that rate. Advantage: Xbox One.
VGChartz also parses numbers down to four sales regions. XBO has already surpassed Wii U in North America, the largest market volume-wise, and it’s catching up in both Europe and the Rest of the World. Wii U has a huge advantage in Japan — but then, XBO doesn’t hit those shores until September 6th. This makes XBO overall sales comparison against Wii U even more notable, because they have been selling more units per month in fewer markets. Unfortunately for XBO, the Xbox 360 was never big in Japan. Fortunately for the XBO, the rest of the globe is a much bigger market than Japan. Advantage: Xbox One.
A console is noting without games, of course, so let’s look there as well. For the sales year 2014 so far, both consloles have a single game in the Top 3: Mario Kart 8 for Wii U (2) and Titanfall for XBO (3). In the rest of the Top 50, the XBO has three games: Watch Dogs (13), Call of Duty: Ghosts (35), and Forza 5 (47). Wii U has New Super Mario Bros. (32), Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (34), Super Mario 3D World (38), , and New Super Luigi U (48) — four games. However, Wii U only has one game in the Top 20, to XBO’s two games. Advantage: Wii U, but not by much.
More subjectively, we need to consider the games themselves. Every Wii U game in the Top 50 is a Nintendo exclusive property; there’s not a single third party title there. XBO has one exclusive title in the Top 50, Forza 5. Their other three titles ranked Top 50 despite competition from PS4, PS3, X360, and even PC in the case of Titanfall. Nintendo is clearly skilled at promoting their own properties, but in the long run they can only release so many iterations of the Mario franchise, whereas XBO will have more popular titles both exclusive and non-exclusive in the future. Looking at the rest of the year reinforces this. Wii U has a Zelda title (Hyrule Warriors), a Mario title (Super Smash Bros.), and a couple of exclusive third party titles like Sonic the Hedgehog and Bayonetta 2. XBO, meanwhile, has games like Destiny, which just finished the biggest beta test ever, as well as new games in popular franchises like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and Far Cry. Advantage: Xbox One.
So, is Wii U or Xbox One doing better? It’s hard to find a metric in the numbers where Wii U is genuinely doing better than the XBO. While one can point to the overall sales figures and say “See?”, that’s a claim that simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. XBO has a clear advantage in this generation, and it’s likely that a year from now even the overall sales numbers will lean its way.
Of course, they’re both currently trailing the PlayStation 4, which beats both consoles on every metric we looked at above. Wii U or Xbox One is really a race for second place, unless one system or the other can score a true exclusive killer title and draw a lot of new gamers to their console.
