Microsoft has shipped 5M Xbox One game consoles to stores, but that’s far short of Sony’s 7M PS4s sold

Microsoft said today that it has shipped more than 5 million units of its Xbox One video game console since launching the system last November. But the company didn’t say how many of these systems were bought by gamers.

Sony, by contrast, said earlier this week it has sold through more than 7 million units of its PlayStation 4 console. That’s an apples-to-oranges comparison, but Microsoft isn’t releasing actual sell-through numbers. Still, it’s not a surprise that Sony is outselling Microsoft. Sony’s machine has an advantage since it is selling for $400, while Microsoft’s console is selling for $500.

That means that Microsoft has shipped to retailers more than $2.5 billion worth of hardware to retailers. Sony, meanwhile, has sold more than $2.8 billion worth of consoles to gamers.

Overall, that means as many as 12 million consoles have sold since November. That likely means that both companies are outpacing their sales marks in the past generation. In the U.S. alone, both Microsoft and Sony are doing better than the previous generation of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sales at the same point in the devices’ lifecycles. One of the reasons is that both machines are based on PC-like components from Advanced Micro Devices. These parts are easy to make, so manufacturing isn’t holding the console makers back from shipping lots of systems to stores.

“PS4 and Xbox One continue to see success with cumulative sales of the two consoles through the first five month currently totaling more than double that of their predecessors, the PS3 and Xbox 360,” said Liam Callahan, an analyst at market researcher NPD Group.

Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, the head of marketing and strategy for Xbox, said in a statement that the company sold 311,000 Xbox Ones and 111,000 Xbox 360s in March in the U.S. The company got a got a boost from the launch of Electronic Arts’ and Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall sci-fi shooter game in March. That title turned out to be the No. 1 game in the month, but Sony still outsold Microsoft in the U.S. for the third straight month.

Microsoft said that players are spending an average of five hours per day on Xbox One and collectively have totaled more than one billion hours of time spent in games and apps on the console. The gamer broadcasting app Twitch has been particularly popular since it went live on the Xbox One. Microsoft also said it has sold 2.9 games per console.

With Xbox One and Xbox 360 combined, the Xbox platform sold the most games across all console platforms with 4.1 million games sold, Microsoft said. Xbox One sold 1.4 million games in March and Xbox 360 sold 2.7 million, totaling 49 percent of the total software market share.