PlayStation “Super Dominant” Says Microsoft, Outsold Xbox by a 69/31 Ratio this Past Holiday

wccftech.com:

Today, Microsoft held a press conference in Brussels, during which they again tried to make the case that their proposed $69 billion purchase of Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard should be allowed to go forward. The objections of regulators in the EU, UK, and US have largely hinged on whether the deal will restrict access to Call of Duty and Microsoft made a couple of moves today to ease concerns on that front, including signing a 10-year contract to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo systems and announcing that Xbox games, including CoD, will be playable on NVIDIA’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service should the deal go through. Per Microsoft, these moves will make Call of Duty available to 150 million more players than before.

In addition to the Nintendo and NVIDIA deals, Microsoft spent much of their press conference trying to reframe themselves as the underdog in this fight. Microsoft president Brad Smith referred to Sony as a “super dominant" company (thanks to GamesIndustry.biz for the transcript) in the gaming space and shared some rather interesting stats. According to Smith, PlayStation outsold Xbox by a 69-to-31 ratio this past holiday season. In Europe, the PlayStation/Xbox split is 80/20, in Japan it's 94/6, and globally, if you take Nintendo out of the mix, Sony has a 70 percent share of the market.

It’s a fair point, to a degree – Sony is a bigger player than Microsoft when it comes to gaming. That said, there’s a lot of asterisks to take into account here. Like the fact that all these figures shared by Smith completely ignore Nintendo, which is the actual console gaming market leader right now, with over 120 million Switches sold. Of course that complicates the “Sony is completely dominant” narrative.