Xbox Series X Release — The battle of the media presence

A war is fought on multiple battlefield, and consoles wars are no different. Some will matter than others, the main being the number of units that get sold, but today we are looking at another one, that matters to us as we work with media and related projects every day: media presence.

The Xbox Series X was officially released yesterday, and it seems like an excellent opportunity on well it has been doing when it comes to its presence in online articles. And while we are at it, we will also look into the PlayStation 5 performance to date.

Lack of a first move advantage

Looking at the volume of coverage secured online over the past year, the PlayStation 5 has been ahead of it Microsoft’s counterpart most of the time, but it appears it has been true more so in the past three months (with November not over yet obviously), showing a strong advantage to Sony on the media field.

Looking at the share each of these next gen consoles represent of all the articles mentioning their respective brands, it is quite revealing to see that Sony has pushed a lot more the PS5 to media than Microsoft has for the Xbox Series X.

More than half of the articles in Sep/Oct/Nov 2020 that mentioned PlayStation also mentioned the PlayStation 5.

For the Xbox series X, that 50% mark has only been passed in November, the month of release of the console.

That big discrepancy is probably indicative of a very different approach to the marketing of this new generation of consoles, with Microsoft probably taking a longer term approach, and not pushing exclusives as much, and dedicating a larger share of its energy to the current gen (or should I say old gen now?) of the Xbox One, than Sony.

But this is just the first bout, and there are still many skirmishes ahead before we can tell who has handled this generation’s strategy better.

Note on the methodology

To find out more about the media monitoring tool we use, you can read this article about it.