back to article Sony pips MS with 4.1m motion controller sales

Sony has said that it has sold 4.1m PlayStation Move controllers around the world. The claim comes hot on the heels of an announcement from Microsoft this morning that it has sold 2.5m Xbox Kinect add-ons. The Move was launched in September, a couple of months ahead of the Kinect introduction, so it would be surprising indeed …

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  1. Shaun 1

    Trouble is

    It's not entirely comparable, is it?

    PS Move came out in mid September, Kinect came out early-mid November (2 months later)

    PS Move needs a controller per player, Kinect can handle up to 4(?) players

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      But ...

      It was comparable when it came to discussing XBox 260's lead over the PS3 sales wasn't it!!

      Oh wait, I get it. Microsoft are not in the lead so it doesn't count.

      Pathetic!

      1. Shaun 1

        No

        It wasn't comparable then either, unless you were talking about time since launch.

        OK then, with the PS Move, Sony have said that they shipped 1m units in the first month. MS have shipped/sold 2.5m in roughly the same length of time

    2. DrXym

      On the flip side

      Sony's launch was relatively low key whereas Microsoft has been buying coverage left and right with large hats filled with money - Oprah, Ellen etc.

      As for number of players, Kinect supports 2 "active" players whatever that means.

    3. Daniel B.
      Troll

      Same applies for the 360 vs. PS3 fudging

      MS and 360 sheeples have been baaaa'ing a lot about the total number of 360s being higher than PS3s, despite the full year the 360 had been out by the time the PS3 came out. The Sept 2010 numbers show that the gap is roughly at 3 millions, which means the gap is probably going to close during the next year or earlier. Never mind that there are more PS3s than 360's in almost everywhere except US and UK.

      And there's still the RRoD-replacement purchases to account for.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Kinect is only 2 players, Sony= Sold, Microsoft = Shipped.

      It originally supported 4 players, but Microsoft cost cutted it. It's now only 2 active players.

      Also this article is so fail. It managed to get Sony and Microsoft's reporting methods round the wrong way.,

      Sony class sold as sold to retailers. Microsoft class sold as shipped from warehouses. This is common knowledge.

      So, Sony have SOLD 4.1m Move, Microsoft have SHIPPED 2.5m Kinect.

      Also, the number does NOT include camera or navigation controllers.

      "The 4.1 million number is accurate as of November 2010 and reflects global sales, Sony said. It does not include sales of the stand-alone PlayStation Eye camera or the stand-alone PlayStation Move navigation controller."

      Clearly Move is flying off the shelves. Kinect not so, there are more coming back to our store right now after the polish on the turd has worn off.

    5. jai

      Kinect can handle up to 4?

      in the advert, the game clearly shows only 4 players doing the Michael Jackson dancing stuff.

      But there's 5 people dancing in the room 'playing' the game...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Kinect can handle up to 4?

        No, the advertisement shows 4 people dancing in front of the TV but only the one at the front is playing the game.

        The rest are just dancing in positions that roughly reflect the dancing background characters, just for the hell of it or is it carefully crafted to mislead? What do you think?

        You may not be aware, with the Dance Central game, you have to copy the character on the screen and you get points based on how well you do it. You don't control the dancing character with your body movements at all.

        I've said it before and i've said it again, Kinect can't do half the things that people have been lead to believe it can. if you boil it down, its a con, classic case of Emporor's New Clothes.

    6. Ojustaboo

      can kinect do 4 player?

      Kinect MIGHT be able to handle 4, but only if you have a huge room.

      In order for my son to be able to use his Kinect in his average sized UK bedroom, we have had to buy him a new desk, move his bed under his window, well completely rearrange his room.

      And now he JUST has the recommended minimum 6ft distance between him and the Kinect, I imagine even now, he doesn't have enough room to play all games properly, we will find out on Christmas day.

      As soon as you throw 2 people into it, the minimum distance jumps from 6ft to 8ft. Just look at the official kinect forum on MS to see all the problems people are having trying to get enough floor space to use it.

      If you google for Kinect 4 players, it doesn't make that good reading. So far I've only come across sites that say it can only really track a max of 2 peoples movements at one time.

      I've also yet to find (might me my crap google skills though) a Kinect game that actually supports 4 local players playing at the same time.

      So in reality, £120 for Kinect and a massive furniture move around for most people (can imagine a fair few disappointed kids come Christmas) or £72 for 2 PS3 move controllers and the move camera, add on another £40 for a couple of move nav controllers if you want them and your at roughly exactly the same price (slightly cheaper for the PS move system).

  2. mt1
    FAIL

    WOW

    Pips it how exactly?

    2.5 months move sales vs 25 days kinect sales..

    $150 addon vs $40 controller

  3. StooMonster
    Grenade

    Question for Sony's PR

    "Sony has said that it has sold 4.1m PlayStation Move controllers"

    Is that just Move Controllers or do Move Navigation Controllers count separately? Also, what about PlayStation Eye? Moreover the Move Starter Pack (contains one Move Controller and PlayStation eye but lacks Navigation Controllers).

    Also, some games need two Move Controllers for single player; two player games might need two or four of them.

    Not quite comparing apples to oranges -- unless one knew how many PS3 were "move enabled" versus how many 360 are "Kinect enabled"

    1. DrXym

      No games need 2 controllers

      I agree clarification is required as per sales. However I am not aware of any game which *needs* 2 controllers. Some games support 2 controllers if you have them though. e.g. the sports game allows you to play archery with one or two controllers.

      1. Shaun 1

        I think

        I think that some games in the future will require 2 controllers, but to keep the entry costs low, all the launch titles only need 1

    2. Michael C

      Sales and SKUs

      Sony has reported SKUs moved, not controllers. A box set or bundle is 1 SKU, not 3 sales. The 4.1 million number likely includes 2-2.5 million boxed sets (they don;t break down the numbers), so somewhere around 5-6 million move or navigon controllers sold. This is a channel sales number, but that is because Sony does not enforce on enough of their partners to report back on units moved out to consumers (aggregating that data from tens of thousands of sellers, most of whom buy through the channel and not from Sony direct, is a monstrous task, especially when sony has literally tens of thousands of SKUs.

      Microsoft equally stresses this is "sold" units, but at the same time, no guarantee can be made of that. Most of this is pre-order sales, so it;s pretty reliable, but it is still very far from guaranteed.

      only Apple, Dell, and a few others, who sell mostly direct and very little through partners and retail outlets, report highly accurate numbers.

      As other people pointed out, Sony made a fairly soft launch of Move, rolling out to new nations every few days, and making little fuss other than in blogs and articles, and only in the last 30 days or so pushed a TV marketing campaign to higher levels. Microsoft came out with a bang, and millions spent a day in marketing this thing both before and after launch. Sony also has a smaller user base by about 20%

      Given 4.1 million skus (~5-6million devices) we're probably looking at between 2 and 2.5 million houses adopting it. Not too shabby. better still for Sony, move is getting rave reviews, while kinect is getting laughed at in viral videos and ripped by analysts quoting its limitations more than its fun-to-play aspects. People are saying kinext is nice to add if you like Wii, Move is what you get if you don't like Wii or think it;s limited in game options. If the trend continues, Sony is going to win this, even though i thin they have made a much slower start and might not be getting the attention it deserves. I'm personally not a fan of either (though i have done write-ups on all 3 platforms and spent many hours with each), and I own no console other than a PS2 and won't say which i feel is the better product. They're both good, in their own ways.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    And yet.....

    ... I haven't seen a single article stating that "Move" is the Xmas must have, whereas "Kinect" is in virtually every article I've seen.

    In terms of the media, compared to kinect, move has been a fail.

    1. Michael C

      really?

      I've not seen any reviews other than paid sponsored ones where kinect was a "must have" xmas present. I've seen Kinect panned as limited, laggy, needs a massive room, and having not much of a future outside of nice games since no buttons really limits options for genre. Move is being hailed as genuinely NEW, and having massive implications on game variation. Its also apparently east to port to older games, so there might eb a hundred games in a year for it, and a few dozen for kinetic. Devs are also used to the nunchuck model of programming motion, where Kinect is a very new interface, and very difficult to use and code for.

      What I see being marketed as the must haves are:

      - iPad

      - PSP slim

      - Motion plus adapters for Wii

      - inductive charging pads for controllers

      - the general console itself

      Also what I've seen is move controllers as stocking stuffers... Yea, they're considered a low enough priced item to not even warrant being a gift, but a stuffer, aka, an impulse buy...

  5. [Yamthief]
    Jobs Horns

    Pointless demographic

    "The Move was launched in September, a couple of months ahead of the Kinect introduction"

    ...Apple have rubbed both Sony and M$'s noses in it by releasing that they've sold well over 40 million iPhones of all models since their release 3 years ago.

    The product is in no way comparable as StooMonster and Shaun 1 have stated above, and it's been out for a LOT longer.

    [iHate: Simply because regardless of the sales of Apple's Jesus phone, I'm still no iFan]

  6. Giles Jones Gold badge

    Kinect

    How many Kinect's have been sold to hardware hackers?

    It's become a popular device to be used for robotics and developing controller-less interfaces for computers.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not quite...

    According to http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/30/sony-ships-4-1-million-playstation-move-controllers-to-retailers/ this is 4.1m shipped - not necessarily sold. Big difference.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    2 "active" players

    So Kinect is all set to be able to cope with the offside rule in FIFA12 then!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    ..nothing to play??

    ..has the writer of this rather flimsy article not seen the recent PS3 release schedule? If you have nothing to play then you have no interest in any genres of current games on the PS3.

    as for the sales.... a single kinect allow full multiplayer on an xbox360...you'd need 4 (at least!) controllers for same thin on the PS3. PS3 move is around 40 quid. kinect is around 120 quid.

    PS3 move has been available for a couple of months...Kinect for less than a month.

    its apples v oranges here. lets wait until the year and and then try looking at figures.

    PS I'm not an xbox360 fan... i dont even have one. i'm a PS3 guy but I do like the Kinect tech...it

    might even be the reason to get xn xbox360 finally.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    4.1 million actually represents Move units shipped to stores

    A Sony representative explained that the 4.1 million actually represents Move units shipped to stores, adding "While we don't disclose our exact sell-through number, the key is that our retailers continue to ask for more Move units and are taking every unit we can supply them with based on their sales." Which, you know, would have been a cool thing to put in that press release, we thin

    joystiq.com

    1. DrXym

      Certainly Amazon are shipping lots of Move controllers

      I had one in my basket last week for £32, then it went out of stock. Then only Amazon Market scalpers were selling them. Then it turned up again this week at full RRP of £39.99. The boxed sets are also out of stock except for scalpers. I'm not monitoring Kinect but I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true there.

      I do believe both systems are going to struggle to appear in 1/4 of their respective user bases. However I think Move has longer legs to it than Kinect. The Kinect launch lineup clearly demonstrates the device's limitations. The price, lag, space requirements, and the lack of suitable game genres is going to do it in.

  11. bex

    not sales

    sony have shipped 4.1 move controllers to retail, how many have been sold, that's another story.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    apples|oranges

    At first I thought this was an apples to oranges comparison, but now I see that the comparison is reasonable and that both products have comparable sales: Kinect handles 4 players and costs 4 times as much as the Move controller.

    If we aren't comparing sales, then the Move should be compared to the Wii, not the Kinect

    I am unlikely to buy either.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      2 players

      it cannot handle 4 players since MS reduced the spec.

      1. Ojustaboo

        re 2 players

        Looks to be the case, even games that appear to allow more, don't seem to.

        to quote

        http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/27/tsunoda-harmonix-address-kinect-player-limit/

        Dance Central treats dancing "a lot like Karaoke," in that people can be "intimidated by the experience and want to do it for the first time with a group of friends." As such, Dance Central only scores one player at a time, whoever happens to be closest to the Kinect unit. While other players are recognized as infrared outlines -- something we witnessed during our own preview -- they aren't actually scored by the game (though the game will switch the player being scored if someone else moves closest to the camera).

  13. Eeep !
    FAIL

    And learning from the past ?

    Instant vox pops has shown to indicate sooooooooooooooooo much that is good in the world - scarily technologists (makers and consumers) can't remember the actual pros and cons of gadgets other than the one in their hands and are willing to remake their mistakes if what they see is shiny, not more shiny, just shiny.

    The best thing about technology is that is shows the stupidity of people :(

  14. A 31
    Thumb Down

    .... none of these ...

    are particularly good ... used them both for 2 weeks, and now back to a proper controller for proper games :D (realised that I played games to relax or have fun, not to do exercise).

    as for the poor souls getting emotional over these stats ... pretty sad really, its a piece of device, doing a bit less well than another, for now, and who cares ?

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