First month of Xbox One S availability sees Microsoft top the NPD sales chart

Xbox is back on top. We can hear Microsoft purring from here.

August NPD
Xbox One was the best-selling console of August 2016 at US retail.

We're waiting on the full report from the NPD Group.

Compare month-on-month: July 2016

Compare year-on-year: August 2015

First details of the NPD's monthly sales report have begun to filter out, starting with a delighted announcement from Microsoft.

The platform holder confirmed that the Xbox One was the best-selling console in the US for the month of August, giving it two consecutive months in the top slot. This is a really big deal; Xbox One has out-performed PS4 less than ten times over the 33 months since both consoles launched.

The Xbox One S launched in August, kicking off with a 2TB launch edition on August 2 and following up with more affordable 500GB and 1TB versions a couple of weeks later. It's not clear whether this was the motivation for the increased Xbox One sales, or whether it was a continuation of last month's trend of users picking up bog-standard Xbox One consoles on the cheap following a price cut.

Cheekily riffing off yesterday's announcement of the PS4 Pro's November launch, Microsoft said the Xbox One S is the the only console available this holiday with built-in UHD 4K Blu-ray, 4K video streaming and HDR for video and gaming.

The company also pointed out that total global gaming hours on Xbox One consoles increased 42% percent year-over-year, and that the Xbox Design Lab has generated “hundreds of thousands of designs” – no mention of sales, though.

We'll have full details of the NPD's report for August 2016 as soon as possible; the organisation dragged the chain a bit last month.