Microsoft has not officially released Xbox sales figures in nearly a decade. However, the company has now unexpectedly shared numbers on how many Xbox consoles have been sold, and the most interesting one is that they have shipped over 21 million Xbox Series X and S units.
The figure was disclosed by a Microsoft employee during a presentation at the BIG Festival gaming convention in Brazil recently, as reported by Future Game Releases and others. It was also mentioned that over 79 million Xbox Series and Xbox One consoles have been sold in total, indicating that the Xbox One figure is around 58 million units. The distribution between X and S is unknown, but 48 percent of Series S players are reported to be new Xbox gamers, suggesting that the console’s low price is attracting new customers.
It is unclear whether the figures represent the number of consoles sold or the number shipped to retailers, but regardless, they provide an approximate picture of the consoles’ popularity.
Xbox Series X|S console sales are at 21M+ according to Microsoft at BIG Festival in Brazil.
— John Welfare (@Welfare_JBP) June 29, 2023
Credit to @LucasTaves for this information. This is all part of an ID@Xbox presentation pic.twitter.com/cOYtQSfwxN
It is also interesting to compare these numbers with the competition. The latest figure for PlayStation 5 is 38.4 million shipped consoles, and that data is from April. So, roughly speaking, the PS5 is selling twice as well thus far. One explanation is undoubtedly the game lineup: Sony studios have released heavy hitters like God of War, Spider-Man, Gran Turismo, and Horizon, while Xbox Game Studios, aside from Forza Horizon 5 and Halo: Infinite, have struggled to produce any major hits. However, they have Starfield and Forza Motorsport coming out this fall, so hopefully, we will have two enticing consoles to choose from.
Microsoft recently unveiled a slightly updated Xbox Series S. It is black and has double the storage capacity of the current white version, which means 1TB. It will premiere on September 1st.
