The Xbox One has out-sold the original Xbox 360’s day-one totals, according to a press release on Xbox.com sent out at 4:30pm on Friday. It has also sold over a million units globally, and is “now sold out at most retailers”.
The price of the console, which includes the new and improved Kinect 2.0 motion sensor, is $499 in North America and £429 in the UK. That’s $100/£80 more than the PlayStation 4, which went on sale the week before at $399/£349. The PlayStation 4 also sold over a million units on the first day, putting the consoles neck and neck in the next-gen (now current-gen) wars.
There were midnight launches across the 13 countries where the Xbox One went on sale, including over 500 stores in the UK which reportedly sold out “almost immediately”. Microsoft was originally going to launch the console in 21 countries, but cut the list down to just 13 in August, citing the added requirement of localising the console in multiple European languages as the reason for the delay.
With the ability to track statistics generated by their console’s games, Microsoft also said that following the launch, players slaughtered over 60 million zombies in Dead Rising 3 and drove over 3.6 miles in Forza Motorsport 5, pulled off 7.1 milli0n combos in Killer Instinct and stabbed 8.5 million enemies in Ryse: Son of Rome. And that was all by 4:30pm on Friday – those numbers have presumably increased since then.
In total, there are 23 games available for the Xbox One at launch, 14 of which are disc-based and the remainder digital downloads from the Xbox Live Marketplace, compared to 8 disc-based games and 15 downloadable games that were playable on launch day for the PS4.
