The PlayStation 5 is massively outselling the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, achieving almost five times the number of sales in the first three months of the year according to an industry analyst. This represents a sharp decline in the performance of Microsoft’s flagship consoles, adding to the mounting woes already facing the Xbox brand.
Daniel Ahmad, a video games analyst at market research firm Niko Partners, revealed the findings in a detailed thread posted to Twitter / X, in which he broke down Sony’s recently released results for the 2023-24 financial year.
“The PlayStation 5 shipped 4.5 million units in the last quarter [January-March 2024],” Ahmad said. “According to our estimates, this is almost 5x more than the Xbox Series X|S shipped in the same period.” He followed this up with a tongue-in-cheek joke that this statistic was “a bonus one for the console warriors.”
From this we can extrapolate that the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S sold a combined total of under one million units during the last quarter.
In a follow-up post, Ahmad explained that the sales gap has widened significantly “in just the past year”. Before this, the products were selling at a much closer 2:1 ratio, and the numbers paint a pretty clear picture of the growing disparity between the performance of the competing Sony and Microsoft machines.
A desire to cut costs in order to compensate for the poor performance of the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S might go some way to explaining Microsoft’s recent closure of multiple studios, including Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks and Redfall creator Arkane Austin. This was a controversial decision that not only caused quite a bit of fan backlash but raised questions about Microsoft’s long-term gaming strategy and the competency of the company’s Xbox leadership.
Given the imminent arrival of a Nintendo Switch successor, which we know will be announced 'within this fiscal year', not to mention the possibility of a significantly upgraded PS5 Pro hitting shelves, it’s difficult to imagine that this dire outlook for Microsoft is going to improve any time soon.
We know that Microsoft plans to launch its own Xbox mobile game store, which will predominantly focus on titles like Candy Crush and Minecraft, and could tap into the highly profitable mobile market, but it's unclear whether there’s any plan to improve console sales at this time.
A recent report even indicated that Microsoft has been divided by an internal debate regarding the future of Call of Duty on the platform. The franchise was acquired as part of Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, which closed in October last year, and it’s been hinted that it could come to the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.
This would potentially lead to an uptick of console sales as Call of Duty fans flock to a lower-cost way to play, but there are fears that such a move could undermine the huge revenue that the series typically generates. All of this points to a company that is rapidly losing its grip on the gaming market as it’s continually outmanoeuvred by competitors with more coherent long-term strategies.
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