PS4 Confirmed to Have Sold Over Double Xbox One
Earlier this week, Microsoft confirmed that their last-gen Xbox One family of consoles were outsold by more than two to one by their main competitor, Sony. The PlayStation 4 was most recently reported to have sold just over 117 million units, which places the amount of sold Xbox Ones at around 55 million across their multiple revisions and revamps. This news wasn’t exactly shocking to most who were paying attention, with Xbox’s frankly baffling decisions in the first few months of their third console’s launch causing a lot of bad faith between them and consumers. The announcement that you could not play used games on the console (which was later scrapped before launch), the poor Windows 8 UI integration, and the ads that appeared on the brand new £300+ home screen of the system left many early adopters with a sour first impression. That’s without mentioning that you had to buy the Xbox One with a now-useless Kinect for the first year of it being on shelves.
This news confirms that Sony won the now obsolete ‘console wars’ in the last generation of gaming. This is largely due to their stellar line up of exclusives and sleeker approach to design and marketing, but also the lack of competition by Microsoft. However, this experience seemed to act as a learning experience for Xbox. Even before the release of their latest generation in 2020, the company were initiating new incentives to get an Xbox, even if you already had a PS4. Backwards compatibility was a feature that was met with a lot of love from the community, and also caused Sony to receive a lot of criticism for why the PS4 never received such an update or support. The ability to play not only your old Xbox 360 but also original Xbox games on one console was certainly enticing (even more so considering the Xbox Series X can do the same thing) and persuaded a lot of those on the fence to pick up the console.
However, the biggest and greatest marketing decision made by Microsoft in regards to Xbox in the last few years has been Game Pass. This acts as a Netflix-style subscription model where you pay around £10 to get access to a library of over 100+ games. This isn’t a pitiful collection either, with heavy hitters like Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 coming to the service day one of release. With a constantly changing game collection to play, fans flocked to Xbox consoles to enjoy such an excellent deal. Better yet, unlike Sony’s PlayStation Now service, you can download all of these games, meaning you’re not forced to sift through lag with mandatory cloud streaming. In fact, this has become so popular, PlayStation have emulated it with their new ‘PlayStation Plus’ model in an attempt to cash into Xbox’s big money-maker.
Although the Xbox One will go down as losing to PlayStation last generation, this isn’t exactly a failure for the brand. To put this in perspective, the PS4 is now the second-best selling home console ever, trailing only behind the ever-successful PS2. In comparison, the Xbox One selling as much as half of this amount is still widely impressive. With 55 million sold, this not only trumps the GameCube, original Xbox, and Wii U but is actually more than all of them combined. If such a widely disliked console by many can sell so well, who knows what the future will hold for Xbox. By taking into account Microsoft’s sweeping changes to their aging formula, it’s not a stretch to assume that the fresh Xbox Series of consoles (especially the genius disc-free Xbox Series S just made for Game Pass) will sell an incredible amount over their lifetime. Well, that’s if anyone can get their hands on them.
