PlayStation 4 vs. Xbox One November Sales

Sony's SNE newest game console proved to be the most popular last month. According to AllThingsD, Sony's PlayStation 4 outsold Xbox One domestically with the "highest first month sales of a hardware platform on record." IGN provided a few more details, revealing that Call of Duty: Ghosts was the best-selling game in November, followed by Battlefield 4, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and Madden NFL 25. Grand Theft Auto V, which sold 15 million units in three days and was the best-selling game in October, rounded out the top five. "Demand continues to overwhelm supply, but we're working hard to get PS4 units into the hands of customers throughout the holiday season," Jack Tretton, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, told AllThingsD. While Sony set a new record locally and globally (PlayStation 4 sold 2.1 million units worldwide in less than a month), Microsoft MSFT has something to brag about as well. When the Windows maker released Xbox One on November 22, more than one million units were sold worldwide. This isn't as fast as Sony, which sold a million PS4 units just as quickly in the United States alone. Related: One In Every Three PlayStation 4 Games Sold Is From Electronic Arts Microsoft might be catching up, however. According to a tweet by Larry Hryb, the Director of Programming for Xbox Live, Xbox One sold an average of 101,000 units per day in November.

November NPD's: #XboxOne was the fastest selling console in NA last month - averaging 101k units sold per day

— Larry Hryb (@majornelson) December 12, 2013

That is a very interesting statistic, but if you add up the number of days that Xbox One was available in November (nine days; November 22 through November 30), Microsoft did not have much time to be "fastest." Based on the average daily sales rate provided by Hryb, it seems that Xbox One sold 909,000 units in November (nine days x 101,000 units sold = 909,000). Xbox One may have sold a greater number of units on a per day basis. But how could it be the fastest-selling console in North America when PlayStation 4 sold one million units -- more than Xbox One seems to have sold for the entire month -- in just one day? Regardless, neither company is a "loser" in this scenario. Both Sony and Microsoft sold a tremendous amount of game consoles in a very short period of time. But there is one aspect of the game industry that suffered: the actual video games. According to AllThingsD, November software sales were down 41 percent from the year-ago period. Console sales, on the other hand, were up 80 percent year-over-year. Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.