Microsoft has piped up about its sales results for Black Friday, the start of the holiday shopping season in the USA. The Xbox 360 has, Microsoft tells us, done really well. The company says it is on track to clock the best ever Black Friday* for the console and top the PS3 by a margin of three-to-one.
Note that's 'on track'. At the time of the release the figures weren't there yet. The exact wording goes - "Retailers reported Xbox 360 console sales over the Black Friday weekend were on pace to beat previous years, outselling the PlayStation 3 by a three-to-one ratio and estimating a 25 percent increase from Xbox 360 Black Friday sales figures from 2007." Yes, as well as not being firm figures, they're from "retailers", rather than NPD, which impartially collates national US games sales data.
SPOnG's not saying these figures won't prove to be accurate, just that they've not been audited yet.
What was a bit less equivocal was the assertion that, "Xbox 360 sales have also surged worldwide since the September price drop, outselling the PlayStation 3 week over week across Europe. Console sales in Europe are up as much as 400 percent, with sales nearly double year over year and reaching seven million consoles sold this generation."
Mysteriously, no mention was made of the Wii's performance in comparison to the 360's. You can probably translate that as Microsoft-speak for 'we think the Wii did better than the 360, so we're not going to talk about it.'
* We are unsure why it's called 'Black Friday' when all our American friends appear to do on it is buy white goods - oh, and stampede over innocent Walmart staff.