In an effort to combat the recent news that Microsoft has already sold 2.5 million Kinect units, Sony has announced that they have been able to move over 4.1 million PlayStation Move controllers worldwide. While the company says that they are not counting individual sales of the PlayStation Eye camera or the Move navigation controller, sources are puzzled as to how Sony is arriving at this number.

While Sony is declaring a lead over Microsoft in the motion controller battle of 2010, analysts we spoke with tell us that it is unclear how Sony is calculating this number. The press release from Sony itself could be interrupted to mean that company has sold 4.1 million PlayStation Move controllers individually, which likely means that many buyers purchased two Move controllers to allow for two-player action on their console.

This, in turn, means the gap is perhaps much narrower than Sony is leading people to believe with the 4.1 million unit number. In addition, our sources tell us that the number could actually be the number of units shipped and sold to retailers, and not the number that are actual customer purchases.

While some sources are declaring the news a significant win for Sony, others suggest that Move had a significant head start over Microsoft by virtue of the fact that it shipped first. While we are not ready to declare it a draw, it is clear that Microsoft will have to sell a lot of units to close the gap and reach its goal of five million Kinect units sold before the end of the year.

Analysts we spoke with tell us to expect the sales battle to go down to the wire to see which one of the two manufacturers will be able to move more units before the end of the year.