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February marked another sales victory for Sony’s PlayStation 4 in the US.
VentureBeat reports that the result means that PS4 has outsold Xbox One for 12 of the last 14 months in the region, with Sony saying: We continued to see strong year-over-year sales growth for PS4 hardware and software and are truly humbled by the support and enthusiasm from gamers.”
Microsoft, however, pointed out that Xbox One software sales were up 49 per cent year-on-year for the month, while the number of hours logged gaming on Xbox Live worldwide was up 93 per cent.
Ubisoft’s Far Cry Primal was February’s best-selling game, followed by Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Grand Theft Auto V, Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm and NBA 2K16.
Street Fighter V managed only seventh place in the monthly Top Ten. More positive was the performance of Nintendo’s Fire Emblem series, with Birthright climbing ninth place – and that’s despite sales being split across three SKUs.
In fact, had sales of all three – that’s Birthright, Conquest and a Special Edition – been combined, the game would have ranked third. Nintendo said that 400k copies of the RPG were sold in the US across physical and digital in just over a week, breaking records for the series.
The overall US games market in February was down 12 per cent year-on-year at $842.5m. Comparisons with last year’s numbers struggled in the face of 2015’s launch of the New 3DS XL and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D.
Hardware sales were down 23 per cent, with portable hardware down 58 per cent. Last-gen software sales collapsed by 77 per cent with next-gen software slipping by just six per cent.
