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Nearly One Third Of PS4 Owners Switched From Xbox 360 Or Wii

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When you move 10M units of a new console, all those sales have to come from somewhere. While Sony is stumped about how the PS4 has sold so well, Nielsen has looked at the data which reveals that a large part of the total are those who jumped ship from their former Nintendo or Microsoft consoles.

According to data given to Re/code, Nielsen surveyed 1,200 gamers from age 7 to 54 and found that 31 percent, almost a third, bought a PS4 after owning an Xbox 360 or Wii, but not a PS3. Another large portion, 17 percent of respondents, did not own a previous generation console at all, though as per the methods of the survey, that total could include those who sold their PS3s at GameStop to help pay for PS4. Though given the very prominent lack of backward compatibility of the console, I can't imagine that number was too large.

It's been a hot topic of conversation lately as to why Sony is this far out ahead of its competition, despite the fact that few major exclusive titles currently exist for many consoles, and ones that do (Mario Kart, Titanfall), don't appear to be helping Nintendo or Microsoft catch up with the PS4. Rather, if anything, the gap is widening.

Erik Kain wrote last week that the PS4's innate "boringness" was key to their success:

"Sometimes boring is the most business-savvy road to travel. Sometimes it’s a word that shouldn’t carry such negative connotation. If games are the most important thing to gamers, making things like the Kinect or the Wii U gamepad mandatory is a big mistake."

Mark Rogowsky had a laundry list of reasons the PS4 was ahead, including a usual favorite, the price:

"Much has been made of the fact that Sony launched the PS4 for $399, $100 less than the starting price of the Xbox One. But a more important comparison to explain its fast start is that the PS3 was released all the way back in 2006 for $499 or $599. The pricier model was far more desirable and adjusting for inflation would be $708 today. A $399 PS4 is 44% less expensive in constant dollars."

Dave Thier went on to claim that it was the Xbox One which actually helped sell the PS4:

"While the Xbox One’s missteps can’t fully explain the PS4′s runaway success, the “console war” plays a huge part in the relative success of both systems. Just like a sports rivalry feeds rabid fans on either side, Sony’s successful capitalization on the Xbox One’s early missteps fed its own fanbase far more than the company could have on its own."

Between those three articles, they contain just about every argument you can make about the situation, and taken together, that probably is the bulk of the reasoning as to why the PS4 is leaps and bounds ahead of its rivals. I think the "boringness" point probably holds the most weight, however, and I'd actually blame most of it in the original Wii.

The stratospheric success of the Wii made everyone believe that the next generation of consoles would likely have to include something revolutionary to really capture the attention of both gamers and non-gamers. But first, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo practiced on the current generation. Nintendo refined its own motion controls, Microsoft came out with Kinect 1.0 and Sony had Move.

But after that, they all went in dramatically different directions.

Nintendo opted to simply reuse its Wiimotes across consoles, confusing many who thought the Wii U was just a new peripheral for the existing Wii. They relied heavily on the Gamepad being a big new innovation in the age of tablets, but failed to make a case for why the new control system was a must-have, and it absolutely lost all its draw among non-gamers. Swinging a virtual golf club was one thing, but grandma had no idea what to do with a Gamepad, and even gamers had trouble seeing the full potential of the device at first.

Microsoft seemed to think that the Kinect had so much potential, it was a good idea to base their entire next system around it. "Kinect is Xbox One" they proudly proclaimed as they bundled the two together at the cost of a $100 price increase over the PS4. But like Nintendo, and very clearly to a worse extent, they failed to produce more than a scarce handful of games that even used Kinect, and even its basic functions of gesture and voice controls still lacked that key 100% success rate to be truly useful to most. Now, the Kinect has been extracted from the Xbox One and essentially discarded, but at the cost of a very late start for Microsoft and a lot of bad blood among fans.

That leads to why so many 360 or Wii owners jumped ship to Sony, seeing how much weight was being given to these seemingly gimmicky, not ready for prime-time peripherals. Sony experimented with Move, a more blatant Wiimote rip-off than most, but understood that the way things were going, motion controls weren't exactly the next big thing everyone thought they were. They kept voice and gesture controls as an option with the PS Eye camera, but it was just that, an option. Instead what they offered was the most powerful game-playing machine on the market. And even without a huge collection of exclusives, they managed to sell millions on that simple concept alone. Boring won the day.

In trying to attract a broader audience (Nintendo trying to keep non-gamers on board, Microsoft trying to be a living room PC/cable box), these companies lost the plot, while Sony appealed directly to core games. As it turns out, the number of core gamers has skyrocketed in recent years, and that's more than enough to sell ten million units of a single video game console in less than a year. And it helps when you can poach them directly from your competition.

While there's no Nielsen data as to customer loyalty during the last generational switch, it's possible to infer that the situation was somewhat reversed last time around. The PS2 absolutely dominated the original Xbox in sales, but the absurdly pricey debut of the PS3 caused many to check out the competition, the 360, for the first time. And in that cycle, the Wii took the crown with the unprecedented ability to become an outright pop-culture phenomenon, bringing in countless non-gamers to the fold (even if it was only for a little while).

Whether this is the "last" console generation is anyone's guess (I have a hunch it won't be), but it's a long cycle, and Sony shouldn't feel safe just because they're on top in the first year alone. Yes, the PS3 started out slow, but once it overcame its myriad of issues, it pulled even with the 360 eventually. Microsoft and Nintendo could sort out their own problems (and they seem to be on that path), but Sony is enjoying a sizable head start, much of it gained from switching the allegiances of longtime Xbox and Wii fans.

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