Soon after their respective press conferences, Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's Playstation 4 became available for pre-order on a variety of websites and video game retailers.
The hype and excitement generated by the two consoles caused Amazon.com to have the best pre-order week ever in the history of the website. Gamers flocked to the website to reserve their own copies of the consoles, leading to big numbers being thrown around during the flurry of post-E3 time period.
During the "peak demand" period during the pre-order frenzy, more than 2,500 PlayStation 4's and Xbox One's were being pre-ordered on the website every minute. According to GameSpot, Amazon is reporting that there was a 4000 percent increase year-over-year for console orders from the previous year. Furthermore, day-one pre-orders for the consoles totalled almost twice the amount of all the video games sold during last year's Black Friday sales. That is a huge amount of sales, and this is just from one website.
Of course, despite all these pre-orders, there is some hitches to these numbers. After all, pre-orders from Amazon.com did not require users to put any money down, leading to some gamers pre-ordering both consoles to reserve their day one next generation console. How many of those users actually intend to buy one or both of those consoles remains to be seen.
The Xbox One currently has the number one spot on Amazon.com's pre-order spot, but that is strongly effected by only one SKU being available for the console. The PlayStation 4 has several SKU's available for pre-order, leading to pre-orders of the system being fragmented by those options. The PlayStation 4 has five SKU's in Amazon's top twenty spots on the pre-order charts. Stay tuned for more next-gen console news right here.
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