Source: Future Publishing / Getty
Microsoft has kept the Xbox One’s sales numbers a secret for a long time, but now the company is finally confirming the obvious, the PS4 outsold the Xbox One by a lot.
During the PS4 and Xbox One’s prime, it was widely believed among everyone in the video game industry and by those who play games that the PS4 was the king of its generation. Spotted on The Verge, new documents detail how badly PS4 kicked the Xbox One’s a**.
Per The Verge:
Microsoft stopped reporting its Xbox One sales figures at the beginning of its 2016 financial year, focusing instead on Xbox Live numbers. The change meant we’ve never officially known how well Xbox One was holding up compared to the PS4 after the Xbox One’s troubled launch. Analyst estimates have consistently put Microsoft in third place behind Sony and Nintendo, and now documents (Word doc) submitted to Brazil’s national competition regulator (spotted by Game Luster) finally shed some light on how the Xbox One generation went.
“Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales and installed base, having sold more than twice as many Xbox in the last generation,” admits Microsoft, as translated from Portuguese.
The Xbox One Couldn’t Compete With The PS4
Sony no longer reports PS4 sales figures, but as of March, lifetime sales of the console currently sit at 117.2 million. Microsoft has not provided any concrete numbers, but The Verge reports Microsoft could have sold under 58.5 million units. Market research from Ampere Analysis in 2020 confirms that number reporting the install base of Xbox One was at 51 million units at the end of Q2 2020.
But, it’s not all bad news for Microsoft, which is slowly closing that large gap thanks to the Xbox Series S|X and the continued popularity of the Xbox Game Pass subscription service.
Whether Microsoft can catch Sony and Nintendo, now that remains to be seen.
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Photo: Future Publishing / Getty