The ongoing battle between Sony and Microsoft over the latter’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard has illuminated a lot of information.
The latest reveal sheds light on behind closed doors dealings of Microsoft over the last few years, as well as some of the practices that Sony has employed in their fight against the Xbox Game Pass. Today, that pile of information now includes the lifetime sales numbers of the Xbox One and they are…not great.
Everybody knows that Microsoft failed pretty hard in the last console generation. From their horrible PR strategy, always online system, forced bundle with the Xbox Kinect, they started out on the wrong foot and never really found their footing until it was too late.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Sony put the death nail in the console coffin prior to even launching with this classic commercial:
It had gotten so bad that Microsoft stopped reporting on Xbox One sales in 2016, instead choosing to report on Xbox Live numbers instead. However we now can see the rough number sales of the Xbox One over the course of its lifetime.
A new report (via Games Luster) has translated legal documents from the ongoing debate between Xbox and PlayStation in Brazil.
We can see that the lifetime sales of the PlayStation 4 are sitting at 117.2 million as of March of this year, the last time that Sony chose to report on PlayStation sales, while Xbox One sits at just 58.5 million units in comparison – half of what PS4 earned in the same time frame.
Luckily Microsoft has learned from its mistake and the Xbox Series has been its best performing console so far.
While it is still underperforming compared to the PlayStation 5, the sales numbers are close and, according to CEO Satya Nadella, the Xbox Series has been the leading next-generation console in the North American market for the last three quarters in a row.
This is just one piece of information from the pile that we have gotten during the fight between Sony and Microsoft over Microsoft’s attempted acquisition of Activision Blizzard, for a whopping $68.7 billion dollars.
We will keep you up to date with more info as it, inevitably, becomes available.