Horizon: Forbidden West
Credit: Guerilla Games/Sony
Sony had its first major, user-facing event for the PS5 earlier this week, and apparently a lot of people wanted to see it. It peaked with an estimated 7 million viewers across YouTube and Twitch, according to Esports Charts, and it’s dominated the conversation ever since. According to the analysts at DFC intelligence, interest in an earlier Xbox Series X event “paled” compared to the interest in this Sony event:
“One measure of how excited an audience is about a new system is how many non-industry consumers contact us about product reveal events. Starting on May 7th, Microsoft will be hosting monthly reveal events. However, the interest we have seen in the Xbox events paled compared with the June 11th Sony event (which may be a reason Microsoft is skipping a June event).”
For just one metric, the English-language video for Sony’s reveal on Youtube currently stands at over 12 million views. Xbox’s May event is at 720,000.
It’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison: Microsoft has been doling out Xbox Series X information more regularly, and so there was less pent-up demand for more information. And Sony’s event promised first-party games, something that Microsoft is explicitly leaving for later in the year at a more comparable event. Still, it’s hard not to see the continued interest in PS5 over Series X. Just look at Google Trends:
Most Popular In: Games
Google Trends
Credit: Google
The PS5 event this week sort of broke the scale here, but it shows PS5 searches consistently charting far above Series X, even in moments when Microsoft was running events. This is a 90-day chart, but the only time you can see Series X searches exceed PS5 was immediately after its reveal.
This is the essential problem that Xbox has been dealing with since the beginning of this cycle and will continue to deal with during and after launch. The PS4 was just so dominant last generation that Sony’s brand is bound to dominate the conversation short of a major change. Xbox Series X could still wind up on top with some unexpected price differentials, but that’s not the likely scenario at this point. It’s Sony’s game to lose, and has been since the start.
Microsoft knows this, of course, which is why it is steering the Xbox business away from something focused on a single machine and towards an ecosystem-first approach that seeks to monetize players across PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and in the future, xCloud. In traditional console war terms, however, PS5 looks good.
