PS4's outselling the Xbox One by almost 2-to-1. And that's the good news…

The latest sales figures for the big games consoles don't make particularly good reading for Microsoft's flagship Xbox One, unless you take a peculiarly blinkered US-only view.

And even there the big gaming box can't boast of a lead over Sony's PS4 despite it being the closest battleground with only 763,000 units between them...

VGChartz has recently published its figures featuring total sales of the PS4, Xbox One and Wii U up to, and including, May of this year.

From a global perspective the Xbox One is lagging behind the PS4 with 12.8m lifetime sales as opposed to the Sony machine's 23.2m. Putting that into a bit of perspective come the sales of the Wii U hitting 9.7m over its lifetime - that's really not far off the Xbox One.

But as Big Phil Spencer has himself observed, in his recent conversation with Edge magazine, it's in Europe where Microsoft's console has the most work to do.

Partly because of the long time to market of the Xbox One in some European markets - thanks to Kinect localisation - there is an even greater disparity between the two main consoles. Here the PS4 is outselling the Xbox One with 9.2m playing 3.4m.

Spencer then is eyeing up the European gaming convention, Gamescom, in August as a place to kickstart its Euro campaign.

"I'm excited about going to Gamescom at the beginning of August, having another press show where we're able to show games that we didn't show [at E3]," he said in the latest issue of Edge. "So you're going to see brand new games, as well as obviously some repeats, but you're going to see Scalebound, Crackdown, Quantum Break from my friends at Remedy."

Can Microsoft's explosive, exclusive lineup close the gap on Sony's machine come the big Autumn game launches? Let us know what you reckon.

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