Microsoft has sold 18.5 million Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, the analyst has rated.
Xbox doesn’t usually release sales figures for consoles unless significant milestones are reached, which means there are now official numbers on how the Xbox Series X and Series S systems are performing.
However, in a recent review of the console market In 2022, Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis estimated that 18.5 million consoles had been sold by the end of last year.
Harding-Rolls notes that while sales of both the PS5 and Xbox Series X were limited due to ongoing inventory shortages, Xbox managed to slightly increase its share of unit sales over the past year thanks to the more widely available Xbox Series S.
“However,” he notes, “the level of demand for the S-Class during the holiday season, even when pricing is applied, suggests it’s not top-of-the-line with its big brother.”
Last month Sony announced that he was now “much easier” to find a PS5claimed that its hardware shortage was coming to an end, while Microsoft has yet to make a similar claim about the Xbox Series X.
As such, Harding-Rolls predicts that sales differences between the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S will grow in the first half of 2023, at least until the Xbox Series X shortage ends.
“Availability PlayStation 5 improved towards the end of the year, particularly in the US, and global stocks have been much more regularly available in 2023,” he explained.
“Ampere expects a divorce Game drive and Xbox unit sales will increase in the first half of 2023, with Xbox Series X becoming more flat only in the second half of the year.”
Elsewhere in his analysis, Harding-Rolls claims that Microsoft’s share of the gaming market – sales of hardware, game content and subscriptions – increased from 25.5% in 2021 to 27.3% in 2022, while Sony’s share fell from 46.3% to 45%.
Harding-Rolls attributes this to the fact that “spending on Xbox console hardware and console-based Game Pass services increased” compared to 2021, and that “Microsoft expanded its market share in the console subscription segment and achieved an all-time record number of Xbox Game Pass subscribers in the final three months of the year.”
Microsoft president Brad Smith claimed at a press conference last week that Sony’s PlayStation owns 70% of the global console market compared to Xbox’s 30%.
Follow a Consultation of the European Commission in which Microsoft explained why it proposed the acquisition Activision Blizzard should be accepted, Smith also claimed that PlayStation outsold Xbox 69/31 at the end of 2022.
