Microsoft finally admitted
The Xbox One console did not do well, as the PS4 ran over it in a big way…
Microsoft stopped reporting Xbox One console sales at the start of fiscal 2016 and instead focused on Xbox Live data. This change meant that after the Xbox One's rocky start to sales, we never officially found out how well the Xbox One fared compared to the PS4 console. According to analysts, Microsoft has always been in third place behind Sony and Nintendo, but now documents filed with Brazil's national competition regulator finally shed light on how the Xbox One generation actually fared.
"Sony has overtaken Microsoft in sales and installed base, selling more than twice as many PS4 consoles as Xbox consoles in the last generation," Microsoft admits in the document. And what does this mean in practice? Sony no longer reports PS4 shipments, which means we can operate with numbers from March of this year. They say that 117.2 million units of the PS4 console have been sold so far, which means that Microsoft (which did not provide a specific sales figure for the Xbox One) has sold a maximum of 58 million units. The number is fairly close to what Ampere Analysis' 2020 survey found, which put the Xbox One installed base at 51 million units at the end of the second quarter of 2020. The Nintendo Switch is currently at 111.08 million lifetime units sold and looks set to overtake the PS4 this year.
What about Xbox Series S / X vs PS5? Since Microsoft doesn't provide numbers here either, the "evidence" is more circumstantial. Sony is expected to end 2021 with cumulative sales of the PS5 of 17 million units, which according to research by the aforementioned Ampere Analysis, should be about 1.6 times more than the sales of the new Xbox series. So the gap is getting smaller...
Source: Game Luster
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