Xbox 360 leads next-gen console sales in South Africa

Wednesday, 21 October 2009 11:23 Henry Dowling

The console war is raging as furiously as ever, with the build-up to the crazy holiday season set to leave consumers breathless and penniless as they throw the contents of their wallets at sales people in cheap suits. With that in mind, we thought now would be a good time to take stock of the current standings in the battle for console gaming supremacy locally.

XG got in touch with GfK, one of the largest market research companies in the world, to get an idea of how gaming consoles are doing locally, and they were kind enough to fill us in.

According to the figures provided, the Xbox 360 is currently leading the next-gen sales, with an install base of over 102,000 units in South Africa. Following close behind is the Nintendo Wii at 92,000 units and finally Sony's Playstation 3 with 74,000 units. Looking at the console market as a whole, the Playstation 2 easily holds the biggest install base, with an estimated 63% market share.

Below is an overview of the current standings:

Platform	%	Units
PS2	63%	810,000 *
PSP	12%	152,000
Xbox 360	8%	102,000
Nintendo Wii	7%	92,000
PS3	6%	74,000
DS	4%	48,000

Just to be clear, this data only goes up to August 2009, so any recent bursts of activity will not be reflected here, however, it's unlikely to change the standings. In the interests of openness, it should also be said that the Xbox 360 install base figure includes bricked consoles with that naughty RRoD and other causes of gaming doom, in which case the total may not cover the actual "active" consoles. The figures, however, do not include swop outs, only new sales are taken into account. The same goes for the other consoles on the market, although it is well known that hardware failure is more common with Microsoft's machine.

* The PS2 figure is an estimation that involves many mind boggling calculations (which we couldn't hope to try and explain here), and is not considered "as is", such as the other console figures. We presume this is because the PS2 has been in the market since before the dawn of time, and you know, they had better things to do then other than count sales... like invent the wheel and fight off dinosaurs, etc.