MediaPost: Nintendo Halo Effect, Search Share Rises With Release Of Next-Gen PlayStation, Xbox

New gaming consoles from Sony and Microsoft are difficult to find in stores this holiday season due to electronics supply-chain constraints and manufacturing facilities closing as a result of COVID-19.

The two consoles sold out early on Amazon, Best Buy, and other retailers, but Captify analyzed billions of searches during the past three months to understand how console share-of-search between Microsoft Xbox Series X and Sony PS5 has shifted. The data revealed some unexpected trends.

The search data identified that PS5 commanded the majority share of search up to its release for the past three months, with September as the strongest. Despite the last Xbox launch seven years ago, the Xbox Series X’s share of search remained flat for this release.

Captify’s data shows Nintendo Switch’s share of search increased by 18.5% from September to November. At that time, the level of search interest for both the Xbox Series X and PS5 declined during the same period.

‘We saw almost one-quarter of all PlayStation and Xbox searches result in a subsequent search for Nintendo across the period, so Nintendo is certainly in the consideration set for consumers,” said Anand Siddiqui, global vice president of insights and analytics at Captify. “Having said that, 39% of consumer searches for Xbox were followed by a search for PlayStation, so there is more of a direct link between those platforms that can be inferred. Nintendo is overall taking the share of search from October through November.”

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