Microsoft isn’t willing to change the trend that sees the company never discuss in public Xbox One’s sales data, according to a note a spokesperson issued to the American outlet The Verge.
It’s something the Redmond platform owner has been doing for the biggest part of the current generation, probably due to the fact that Xbox One has never been able to sell more or at least as many consoles as its competitor PS4. To put things into the right perspective, EA revealed that Xbox One had sold 19 million units in 2016, a time when PS4 had already sold 35.9 million units.
“We are continuing to look at engagement as our key metric for success and are no longer reporting on total console sales,” says a Microsoft spokesperson. “We continue to see strong growth with time spent on Xbox Live, and look forward to bringing more unprecedented experiences on Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, and mobile.”
Based on this behavior, we know that Xbox Live has around 59 million users on the several platforms where it is available (PC, Xbox One, mobile), 4 billion hours have been invested on [email protected] titles, 1 billion hours on backwards compatibility, and even that the sales of the hardware have raised 15% yoy.
So things don’t look that bad for Xbox One after all and there’s the common perception that E3 2018 could lead the way to a new cycle for Microsoft as the company is willing to start investing again on gaming after the recent restructure.
Will this be enough to maintain the momentum after the launch of Xbox One X and at least reduce the gap with the PlayStation 4, which gets closer and closer to the milestone of 80 million units sold in less than five years?
