Will Watch Dogs Drive Xbox and PS4 Sales?

The company aims to sell 6.3 million copies of the game and announced on Thursday that Watch Dogs sold more copies on its first day than any game in Ubisoft’s history. This from the company that developed and sold Assassin’s Creed.

What impact will the new game have on sales of PS4 and Xbox One? The latest sales estimates from retail researcher NPD Group put combined sales for hardware sales at $192.6 million in April, up from $109.6 million a year ago. Software sales, however, fell 10%, from $267.8 million to $240.8 million. Watch Dogs is touted as a new generation game and reviewers have said that even though it will play on the Xbox 360 and the PS3, the game looks and plays better on the new hardware.

There has been limited data for new sales figures on either the Xbox One or the PS4 since April, when Sony said that it had sold 7 million PS4 units and Microsoft said it had shipped 5 million units to retailers. Microsoft has since said that it sold 110,000 Xbox One units in April and Sony has said nothing, although NPD has reported that PS4 sales continued to beat Xbox One sales in April. Software sales picked up again in April as well, according to NPD.

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Microsoft’s bundling of the Titanfall game with its Xbox One and the company’s further decision to unbundle the Kinect motion sensor from the Xbox One package were efforts to pump up sales of the Xbox One, but so far we have had no official word on how well that worked. NPD did place Titanfall at the top of its list of 10 best-selling software titles for April, however. Typically, though, when a marketing effort has its intended effect, it doesn’t take a company long to toot its own horn, and there has been little tooting out of Redmond this month.

Watch Dogs is unlikely to change the hardware sales rankings of Sony and Microsoft because the game is available on both platforms and will also become available on Nintendo’s Wii U console later this year. Whether Watch Dogs will drive enough new sales for either PS4 to open a wider lead or Xbox One to close and even overtake its competitor is doubtful.

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