The long game?
Sony rested on its laurels with the PS4. It hit its stride right out of the gate, smashing into Xbox One’s awful medieval DRM system (rightfully so), but shortly after, they kind of stopped making progress compared to Microsoft. Meanwhile, their competitor has opened the gates to cross-platform play (something Sony hasn’t answered to yet), given us cross-buy and cross-play on PC, continues to update its catalog with backward compatible titles both first and third party, and allows us to change our Gamertag (hah).
And that’s translating to sales, as Microsoft is claiming in a statement given to Destructoid (and based on an NPD report) that the Xbox One was “October’s best-selling console.” Yeah, they aren’t giving us hard numbers because of how much they’ve been embarrassed in the past (all they give us is “Xbox subscribers”), but that might change if they keep outselling the PS4.
“Keep?” Yeah, this is the fourth month Microsoft can claim that they’re the top console in the US, and the second in AU and EU. They’re stating that the surge is due to Gears of War 4 and Battlefield 1, the former of which is the “top exclusive selling game of October.” More NPD data will be released on Monday.