Apparently, there have been over 21 million Xbox Series X and Series S consoles sold by Microsoft since launch.slide report This number is believed to have been shared by Microsoft in Brazil’s ID@Xbox Developer Accelerator program. That’s a huge number of consoles, but it’s not a very impressive number when compared to the sales numbers of console rivals Sony and Nintendo.
ID@Xbox Developer Accelerator Program slide 21M+ – Xbox Series X|S79M – Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S48% combined – Series S players redeem XboxCredit to @LucasTaves for the first time 📸 pic.twitter.com /sdjWDaY3ZnJune 29, 2023
Microsoft has been tight-lipped about Xbox console sales for nearly a decade. It is speculated that management decided to hide console unit sales by having accountants publicly weigh Microsoft’s Xbox business in terms of Xbox Live and Game Pass subscriptions. This is more optically delivered than the Xbox console’s unit count clearly lags behind its rivals.
Another fact relates to lifetime sales figures for the Xbox One family of consoles. Keep in mind, it’s been quite some time since Microsoft’s Xbox hardware sales reached the last generation. Doing some simple math, we can see that 58 million Xbox One consoles were sold for him during that era. It’s clear that the Xbox Series X/S still have a long way to go to reach such numbers. To handle this data properly, it seems that a graph is required.
|
platform |
release date |
Sales unit (m) |
|
xbox one |
November 2013 |
58 |
|
Xbox Series X/S |
November 2020 |
twenty one |
|
sony ps4 |
November 2013 |
117.2 |
|
sony ps5 |
November 2020 |
38.4 |
|
nintendo switch |
March 2017 |
125.6 |
Note that in the numbers above I have tried to source the latest official totals. Xbox numbers can be found in the Microsoft slide headings at the top. Hardware sales numbers for the latest PlayStation 5 and Switch consoles are based on numbers shared in March of this year, so they’re a bit outdated at this point.
Another interesting piece from Microsoft’s slides is about the cheaper Xbox Series S. At launch, we contrasted Microsoft’s strategy of launching the Series S with Sony’s. The slide’s claim that his 48% of Series S players are his Xbox newbies shows it’s quite a success. That’s a good conversion, and the pricing of this console pushes it further into the impulse buy zone than its big brother (or Sony’s console).
In the current battle royale between the Xbox series and Sony PS5 consoles, it looks like Sony could have a little more lead. Sony was particularly hard hit during the peak of the pandemic due to chip shortages and heavy home demand. But that time seems to have passed now, with Sony predicting another 19 million PS5 consoles will be sold by the end of its fiscal year (March 31, 2024).
A Healthy PC Gaming Market
Finally, another slide from the ID@Xbox Developer Accelerator program shows some numbers for PC games. Yes, the PC remains a very important gaming market, according to Microsoft, with “248.6 million Windows gaming PCs active.”
