Casualties mount as war rages on! Is your wallet dead yet?

News came out yesterday that doesn’t seem to bode well for folks over at Microsoft and Nintendo; Sony has topped 10 million in console sales as of 8/12/14. This is sold, not shipped, which means that there are 10 million people out there playing PS4’s right now. Sony is excited about this for many reasons, largest being that the PS3 only sold 1.3 million in it’s first year and still only had 6 million after year 2. Why else is this big? Well the Wii U has had a full year head start and it’s still only around 6 million and while Microsoft hasn’t released any hard sales numbers yet the folks over at Uproxx have done the math; MS has only sold about 5.3 million XBone’s. While this is just the continuing trend of a 2:1 sales lead that Sony has had from the beginning, things start looking more and more grim the larger the install base gets. What can we infur from this? Well there are a few things to consider:

1. The obvious leader is Sony and unless Microsoft does a MASSIVE righting of the ship they will find themselves way behind in the war. MS started this a little yesterday with announcing the exclusivity of the next Tomb Raider game (which turned out to be timed exclusivety). While 3rd party exclusives will help MS really needs their big calling card, Halo, to come out to help boos sales.

2. The continually thought to be floundering Wii U isn’t in as bad of a position as once thought. Yes, it’s not selling nearly as fast as the Wii did but it’s still out pacing the PS3. It’s a little like what I call the “Hooty and the Blowfish principle”. Everyone thought that Hooty died out and was considered a one hit wonder because their first album went 16x Platinum (over 16million copies sold) and none of their others hit that level, when in reality they followed that up with a Triple Platinum and then another Platinum album. While they were never as big as they initially were, a platinum selling album is nothing to laugh at; there are many bands out there that would sell their left nut for 1 platinum record, let alone 3.

3. This war is far from over! There is still plenty of time for one of the trailers to start charging ahead and if you call Sony the clear winner now, you’re an idiot. They certainly have won the battle, but the war still rages on.