The official status of the console war between Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo is that Sony is winning by a good margin, at least in 2013.

That’s the news out of Asia Nikkei, which reported that Sony sold 18.7 million PlayStation consoles in the 2013 financial year, which just edges out Nintendo’s 16.31 million units and dominates Microsoft’s relatively paltry, in comparison, 11.6 million. Those figures include sales of Sony and Nintendo’s handheld game consoles as well as each company’s TV-bound consoles.

That puts Sony in the lead, and marks the first time in eight years that the electronics giant has out-sold Japanese rivals Nintendo.

Nintendo has been battling with its own “next-gen” console, the Wii U, which hasn’t sold well at all since launch. Nintendo even had to downgrade last year’s sales predictions from a projected nine million down to just two point eight million. Some people still don’t know what it is, or even how it works, something Nintendo has struggled to convey with its own marketing.

Microsoft isn’t really in the running in terms of overall sales numbers, but in its defence its Xbox One console is available in fewer regions than the other two and it doesn’t have a handheld console to speak of.

The company also forced a pairing of its Kinect 2.0 sensor with its Xbox One console at launch, a factor that may have affected sales. In fact Microsoft recently unveiled a Kinect-less Xbox One that sells for the same price as the PlayStation 4 in the US in a bid to “[deliver] more choices for fans“, and also not coincidentally to make their console more attractive when compared to Sony’s $399 PlayStation 4, which retails for R6 799 on our sunny shores.

For now, though, Sony is winning the war for the living rooms of the world while we wait for the chance to even buy the Xbox One in South Africa this September.

[Source – Asia Nikkei, Image – File]