PS4 Continues to Dominate, But Xbox One Catching Up Very, Very Slowly

Over the holiday shopping season, Microsoft gave the Xbox One a series of aggressive price cuts to give it some chance of at least slowing the advancement of Sony's ascendant PS4. First it chopped $100 along with the Kinect, then another $50 to bring it in under the PS4. Aggressive bundling made it pretty difficult to pick up 2-3 free games along with the console. It paid off in the short term, at least in the US: Xbox One outsold the PS4 during some crucial shopping months, giving Microsoft some badly needed good news. But the real goal was obviously to gain momentum that the Xbox One could carry over into the new year, making something like a comeback to make up for the bungled launch. That didn't happen in any appreciable way: Sony's PS4 went back to the top of the NPD reports even after Microsoft made its "promotional" price cut permanent. But now that we're a quarter into 2015 we get to to see some of what the console war looks like two years in. Is the Xbox One catching up? A little bit, at least.