Microsoft typically shies away from disclosing hardware sales and are significantly keener on revealing how many users they have subscribed to Xbox Game Pass – the figure is upward of 15 million – however, following the launch of their next-gen consoles, they’ve opted to reveal that the November 10 drop is the best ever.
Phil Spencer revealed as much on Twitter, claiming the Xbox Series X and Series S has sold more units, in more countries over the course of its first 24 hours on the market than previous launches.
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“Thank you for supporting the largest launch in Xbox history,” Spencer wrote in a tweet. “In 24 hrs more new consoles sold, in more countries, than ever before. We’re working with retail to resupply as quickly as possible. You continue to show us the connective power of play is more important than ever.”
The Xbox One sold more than one million units on launch day in 2013 so it can only mean that the Series X and S sold more this month. Microsoft stopped reporting sales numbers for their console two years post the Xbox One’s release and that isn’t about to change.
“I know it seems manipulative and I’ll apologize for that but I don’t want my team’s focus on [console sales],” Spencer told The Guardian this week. “The primary outcome of all the work that we do is how many players we see, and how often they play. That is what drives Xbox. If I start to highlight something else, both publicly and internally, it changes our focus. Things that lack backwards compatibility become less interesting.
“Putting our games on PC becomes a reason that somebody doesn’t have to go and buy an Xbox Series X. I’ll hold fast to this. We publicly disclose player numbers. That’s the thing I want us to be driven by, not how many individual pieces of plastic did we sell.”
Spencer won’t boast hardware sales even if the new Xbox systems outsell the PS5, pointing out that not all gamers even own consoles, with mobile and cloud gaming having become extremely popular.
“I think the people who want to pit us against Sony based on who sold the most consoles lose the context of what gaming is about today,” he asserted. “There are 3 billion people who play games on the planet today, but maybe [only] 200 million households that have a video game console. In a way, the console space is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the overall gaming pie.”
Next: Xbox Celebrates The Launch Of The PlayStation 5
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