We’ve covered a lot of Amazon pre-order news in the past week, from the PS4 pre-orders on Amazon either sold out or selling out to the massive resurgence of Xbox One Amazon pre-orders following the so-called “Xbox One-80” announcement a few days ago in which Microsoft reversed its policies with regard to DRM, online check-ins every 24 hours and used games. Turns out there was a reason that sort of news consumed so much of our energy: the combined pre-orders for PS4 and Xbox One led to Amazon’s biggest ever week for video game sales.
According to a note we received directly from Amazon’s PR agency, last week the Amazon Video Game store
made history with its biggest pre-order week in history. The reason: the launch of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. In fact, at the peak of demand last week, Amazon customers were pre-ordering more than 2,500 Xbox One and PS4 consoles per minute.
Folks, that’s a lot of consoles. Sony currently has the lead in terms of overall pre-order volume, although the Xbox One Day One edition currently has the top spot in terms of recent orders. The PS4 Standard Edition pre-orders still hold the #3 spot
, while the PS4 Watch Dogs Launch Day Bundle
holds spot #4, the PS4 Battlefield 4 Launch Day Bundle
holds spot #5, and the PS4 Killzone Launch Day Bundle
holds spot #8. It will be very interesting to see how the pre-order volume unfolds as more consumers learn that Microsoft has changed its Xbox One DRM strategy and used-game policies.
Additional data from Amazon’s PR firm indicated that pre-orders of the two next-gen consoles during the week of E3 brought a year-over-year increase in orders of more than 4,000% compared to consoles ordered during E3 week last year. The irony of that figure is that last year’s E3 marked the first time Nintendo was selling its Wii U console. Granted, this year there were two consoles to pre-order, but the 4,000% increase is quite telling in terms of which console(s) gamers were most looking forward to.
In addition, day-one pre-orders for the PS4 and Xbox One was nearly two times that of all video games sales on Black Friday 2012. Again, that figure is nothing short of incredible, and it shows that if you haven’t gotten your pre-order in yet for one of these consoles, you might want to do so now. If Amazon has already set all-time records for sales in its Videos Games store, you can only imagine what the next few months hold leading up to the consoles’ respective releases in November. Presuming, of course, that you can get one then. Yes, we recommend you go pre-order one now if you haven’t already — here are the links: PS4 pre-order at Amazon and Xbox One pre-order at Amazon.
