Xbox has not communicated on the sales figures of its consoles since 2015. At the time, the brand no longer wanted to disseminate this indicator which was to its disadvantage when comparing sales of Xbox One with those of the PS4, and preferred rather communicate on a number of monthly active users. An understandable element that still raises questions today.
Console sales alone aren’t responsible for a brand’s success
Microsoft’s arguments held up perfectly and are still valid today. It is true that the sales of a black plastic box alone do not allow you to really know the success of a brand today. This may have been true at a time when consoles were the only way to access video games, but this hasn’t been the case for a few years now.
Today, we can consume video games with a console and games, but also by purchasing content, subscriptions and other related services. Concerning more particularly Xbox, the brand also earns money through its PC games as well as its Cloud services which allow you to play on mobile, without even needing a console.
The number of units sold of a console is thus one of the success indicators of a brand like Xbox, Nintendo or PlayStation, but far from being the only one. Unfortunately, Microsoft no longer communicates on its number of monthly active users since 2019, which makes it difficult to read its performance with the public.
In its financial statements, the brand rather evokes an overall turnover and specifies every six months or so the number of subscribers to its on-demand game offer. Last January, Microsoft announced 25 million Xbox Game Pass subscribers.
Console sales aren’t that big, but Microsoft still welcomes it
While Sony and Nintendo continue to communicate regularly on the number of consoles sold, Microsoft remains on its strategy of secrecy, a strategy which also seems to go against the transparency that the brand regularly advocates with its direct customers.
If we could understand that Xbox no longer wanted to be compared to Sony at the time of the Xbox One, it is difficult today to really define this strategy since the Xbox Series X|S seem to be selling very well. And even if this were not the case, we know that the Gaming division of Microsoft is growing and that the indicators are rather green. Why continue not to communicate on machine sales? In November 2020, Phil Spencer, boss of Xbox, explained that he did not want that its teams focus on console sales.
I know this sounds manipulative and I apologize. […] but I don’t want my team to focus on console sales. The main outcome of all the work we do is how many players we see and how often they play. That’s what drives us at Xbox.
This week, the VGChartz organization published an estimate of Xbox Series X | S sales and made a comparison with Xbox 360 sales over the same period. The comparison in favor of the Xbox Series X|S has been taken back by Aaron Greenberg, Head of Marketing at Xbox, who took the opportunity to thank those who have helped support the growth and adoption of Xbox into the current generation. But there is a catch.
VGChartz is unreliable
If Microsoft deems that console sales figures should no longer be communicated, why does the marketing boss grab the ball when good results are communicated by outside organizations?
The catch here is that VGChartz is unreliable. And Aaron Greenberg himself castigated the organization in 2010. “I laugh reading VGChartz sales reports. Why do people post information as official when there is no source or science behind it? » he had indicated.
All professional analysts in the sector have long agreed that the figures provided by VGChartz are not reliable. On its site, VGChartz does not share its methodology for estimating sales, but does talk about estimates that are then extrapolated.
VGChartz has been pinned in multiple cases. Arc Rise Fantasia had thus been ranked among the best sellers even though the game had not yet been released. The site was wrong about the release date of the game and had communicated on more than 22,000 copies sold when it was not. More recently, the site showed one million PS5s sold more than the official figure subsequently communicated by Sony (source).
In reality, the site certainly does not have data from the industry and only extrapolates public data, a lack of rigor underlined by many and which sometimes gives right to big differences with reality. Analyst Daniel Ahmad points out that the VGChartz site was founded by taking data from the serious organization NPD, then making adjustments to claim authorship of the data obtained to the point that NPD threatened to sue them.
On Xboxygen, we have long refused to communicate on data from VGChartz. And many are those who do the same, for example Wired.
To go further and understand to what extent VGChartz is not credible, we invite you to take a look at the surveys of Gamasutra (English) and Gamekult on the subject.
In conclusion, we can only regret that VGChartz is cited as a source of console sales data, and even more so when it comes to industry pundits. To avoid any confusion, Microsoft would have everything to gain by communicating again on the sales figures of its consoles, which would not prevent the brand from communicating on additional data to show that its business is doing well.