35 Million (Premium)

A new report claims that Microsoft has sold about 35 million Xbox One consoles worldwide. Yes, that falls far short of the PlayStation 4, which has sold over 76 million units overall. But there are some other comparisons to consider as well.

As I wrote last April, yes, Sony has been maintaining a roughly 2-to-1 sales lead over Microsoft in the current console generation. But that’s still a ton of consoles, and it could be a lot worse.

As is always the case with Xbox, however, we have to rely on second-hand math: Microsoft hasn’t provided the public with hard sales numbers since early 2014. So today’s figures come from Niko analyst Daniel Ahmad, who noted in a thread to an inane article about Xbox that “Xbox One [has sold] around 35 million [units] worldwide.” He bases this number on NPD, which measures only sales to the US, so it’s an educated guesstimate.

Ahmad also has good news for the Xbox One X. We already knew that Microsoft’s 4K console outsold the Sony PlayStation 4 Pro in the US over the holidays—again, thanks to NPD—but he adds a bit of color to that fact: The Xbox One X also outsold the PS4 Pro in the US “when launch aligned.” That means that the Xbox One X outsold the PS4 Pro when you compare their respective launch times; the PS4 Pro in 2016 and the Xbox One X in 2017. “The One X got off to a really good start,” he writes.

In any event, the most interesting data here, guess or not, is 35 million. And that can and should be compared to two things: PS4 sales overall. And Xbox 360 sales over the same time period. (“Launch aligned” sales, as Ahmad might put it.)

Compared to the PS4, Microsoft is a bit south of the 2-to-1 sales differential we’ve long assumed. And that’s fine: 2-to-1 was always a guess anyway. And 35 million is 35 million: Microsoft has established itself as the clear number two in this market, and the Xbox One will not be ignored by third-party game developers as a result.

Put another way, there are roughly 124 million current-generation consoles in the market, if you include Nintendo Switch, which I do. And if you estimate that there are about 12 million Switches in that market today, based on what sales were in December and what Nintendo expects by March. So the Xbox One has about 28 percent usage share. Or almost one-third of the market.

(If you don’t believe that the Nintendo Switch should be compared here, the total size of the installed base is about 112 million units, and Microsoft’s usage share is roughly 31 percent, which is still a bit under one-third of the market.)

Compare that to the Microsoft Store/UWP platform in Windows 10 or Windows phone, and you can see the difference.

I don’t have accurate usage share numbers for all digital devices, meaning PCs, phones, and tablets. But Gartner says there were 2.3 billion digital devices sold in 2017. The PC market represented just about 1/10th of that, and not all of those PCs came with Windows 10. So at best, Windows 10’s market share across all devices was just 10 percent in 2017. It was probably closer to 2/3 of that.

We do know that there are 600 million Windows 10 devices (e.g. users) worldwide. That is usage share. But compared to the 1.3 billion Apple users (mostly on iOS), and over 2 billion Android users (as of May 2017), that’s still a small percentage. If you assume that the Android user base didn’t grow at all since last May—I bet it’s at least 2.5 billion now, or whatever—Windows 10 accounts for just 18 percent of the digital devices market overall.

(Yes, some will complain that Windows 10 doesn’t directly compete with, say, the iPhone. Sure. But these platforms all provide app stores and platforms for developers to target, and they are comparable on that level.)

Windows Phone, meanwhile, never accounted for more than low single digit usage share worldwide, though it briefly touched 10 percent-ish market share (e.g. unit sales) in some places before cratering.

Point being, for all the complaints about the Xbox One “losing” to PS4, it’s actually doing really well comparatively. And that’s aside from my previous point about 2017 being a great year for Xbox.

Comparing Xbox One sales to those of the PS4 is one way to measure success. And it’s a good one. But these sales should also be measured against their predecessors at the same point in time. The Xbox One falling short of the PS4 is less terrible if it is also outselling the Xbox 360 after this much time in their respective lifetimes.

The Xbox One has been in the market for a bit over four years, having launched in November 2013. Its predecessor, the Xbox 360, launched in November 2005, so the ideal comparison here would be the total sales figure as of February 2010.

Microsoft announced that sales of the Xbox 360 topped 30 million units in mid-2009. But it didn’t announce another milestone until January 6, 2011, when it noted that it had sold 50 million units. So we could place the sales level in February 2010 at 39 million units, which assumes that the average monthly sales between May 2009 and January 2011 were consistent. In other words, Xbox One sales are now lagging a bit behind those of its predecessor. Not dramatically. But worth pointing out.

So what are we to make of all this? Ultimately, the Xbox One story hasn’t changed no matter how you do the math: Microsoft will lose this console generation to Sony, again. But it has established itself as a viable alternative, and one that cannot be ignored by developers. Best of all, Microsoft is, as I’ve pointed out before, uniquely positioned to dominate a coming generation of video games that will be more reliant on cloud computing and less on console hardware. That they are this competitive now, thus, should be seen as a net positive.