The Wall Street Journal has just published a new video report called “Xbox Lost the Console War. Now It’s Refining Gaming.” Within that, they used data from Aldora Intelligence, that has roots tracing back to Joost and SuperData. And it shows a split between PS5 and Xbox Series X/S sales that is…probably what you’d expect, if not actually worse.
The data, as seen above, estimates that as of June 2024, a few months ago, PS5 has 61.7 million sales and the Xbox Series X/S had a combined 28.3 million, with of course a large percentage of that, if not the majority, being the much cheaper Series S.
That means Xbox is at 45.8% of the sales of the PS5 this generation. Despite no real launch drama this time around like we saw with the extremely controversial Xbox One release, that is a worse ratio than that generation was, where Xbox had 49% of the sales of the PS4. So things are getting worse, and considering the initial period of any console generation is when it’s performing the best, plus Sony is about to release a new, more powerful model in the (stupidly expensive) PS5 Pro. That’s a pretty bleak picture for the future of Xbox hardware this generation, now with these more specific estimates attached.
This is sort of the point of the video, of course. The rest of it acts as an explainer for non-gamer Wall Street Journal readers about what Xbox Game Pass is and how it can operate outside the console market. They talk about Microsoft’s acquisitions, pretty much a recap of the last few years.
However, they veer back into “things are not great” territory with exploration of the plateau of Game Pass subscriptions, which surged during the pandemic, beating target growth in 2020, but subsequently missing the last two years, including a huge miss where there was a 2022 target of 73% growth when the actual number was 28%.
That leads into a discussion about how players still want to “own” games, and how that is a barrier for some, along with the concept of cloud gaming. Sure, that’s part of it, but I’d make the argument here that Microsoft is simply running into a significant ceiling of where they can draw new Game Pass Subscribers from between existing Xbox players, Steam-focused PC players and niche Cloud gamers. The end conclusion is that Xbox views its “content” as the future of its company, not the hardware which…makes it somewhat akin to a third party developer, as has been the recent observation of the rest of the industry and its own fans.
It’s hard to see how Xbox hardware recovers at this point, given Microsoft’s own emphasis on moving past it, despite still making boxes, and how much they are leaning on Game Pass. If they can deliver a ton of future hits on the service then that may indeed work out long term, but that remains to be seen.
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