On June 30th, Microsoft closed the books on their FY20 fiscal year which brought the closure of Mixer, a re-org, and many other changes to the corporation. At the company’s Inspire conference today, Microsoft shined a little bit of light into the sales of Windows 10 devices last year.
The company announced earlier this year that they had 1 billion Windows 10 monthly active devices and at Inspire, they stated that in FY20 175 million Windows devices shipped and of that figure, about 26 million were gaming PCs.
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Further, the company says that 47% of the devices were “Modern PCs” which I believe means they were 2:1 devices.
From time to time, Microsoft provides these insights but for me, the big takeaway was the breakout of the gaming PCs shipped. When you look at the news earlier this week that Sea of Thieves passed 1 million sales on Steam, the picture becomes clear why Microsoft is bringing Xbox games to both its console and desktop hardware.
While the PS4 has crossed the 100 million threshold last year, if Microsoft includes gaming PCs into its mix of targets for its exclusive content, then it becomes quite clear that the company has a large audience for potential sales that dwarfs Sony’s offering.
This explains why Microsoft is bringing the PC and Xbox closer together. It’s an obvious statement in hindsight but with Xbox+PC being a single demographic for the company, this makes it easier to pitch the idea of spending hundreds of millions (or billions) on game studios.
blue77star
<p>What happened to other half of billion PC not running Windows 10? I am not sure that we can call 2:1 modern PCs, there is really nothing modern about them. 1 milion sales on Steam tells me that PC Desktop market is really important.</p>
Stooks
<p>With the advent of cross play and keyboard mouse on consoles, the Microsoft gaming solution is quite broad. Basically they have all of the bases covered from the Xbox One S, X, series X and gaming PC's at the top.</p><p><br></p><p>I guess the only thing that could slow them down is Xbox Console exclusives that are on the console but not offered on the PC. This would be 3rd party games of course since everything Microsoft is making is Xbox/PC. I am not even sure if their are console only games that run on the Xbox but not the PC??</p><p><br></p><p>I play COD on the PC with cross play enabled. In the lobby you can see who is running what based on the icon. I would say PS4 is the overall winner right now in those lobbies with Xbox and PC making up less than half of each of the average rounds in that game. </p>
chump2010
<p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">"if Microsoft includes gaming PCs into its mix of targets for its exclusive content"</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">It will no longer be exclusive lol. They may as well just release to the playstation as well and make their mind up. Are they in the games studio business – in which case you want to capture as many platforms as possible, or the games console market – in which case they want their games to be exclusive to their own console in order to drive sales of consoles. </span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">" It’s an obvious statement in hindsight but with Xbox+PC being a single demographic for the company"</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">What do you mean by in hindsight? Surely any company knows that if you sell your product to a bigger population, your going to get more sales? No hindsight required. No foresight required. Just plain simple economics. If a company as big as Microsoft, has not grasped that in decades of being around, they have serious management issues. </span></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>