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 mark...