For Microsoft, the two new Xbox consoles provided the biggest launch ever.

„Thank you for supporting the largest launch in Xbox history. We’re working with retail to resupply as quickly as possible. You continue to show us the connective power of play is more important than ever,” Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, wrote on Twitter. The Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S, if we add them together, outsold any of the previous four Xbox generations’ launch sales (and in more countries, as on paper, the Xbox Series models launched worldwide on November 10).

However, this doesn’t give us a hint of which model sold more than the other and going by what Spencer told The Guardian, we’re likely not going to get any sales figures: Microsoft stopped publishing such numbers during the Xbox One’s lifetime (probably because Sony wiped the floor with them with the PlayStation 4).

„The primary outcome of all the work that we do is how many players we see, and how often they play. That is what drives Xbox. If I start to highlight something else, both publicly and internally, it changes our focus. Things that lack backwards compatibility become less interesting. Putting our games on PC becomes a reason that somebody doesn’t have to go and buy an Xbox Series X. I’ll hold fast to this.

We publicly disclose player numbers. That’s the thing I want us to be driven by, not how many individual pieces of plastic did we sell. I’m not going to go compete with their numbers based on how many Xbox Series X I’ve sold. [Google] is never going to talk about how many Chromecast Pros they sold. They’re going to talk about how many players they have. I think the people who want to put us against Sony based on who sold the most consoles lost the context of what gaming is about today. There are three billion people who play games on the planet today, but maybe [only] 200 million households that have a video game console. In a way, the console space is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the overall gaming pie,” Spencer said.

Due to the increased presence of streaming from the cloud (which is what Spencer hinted at with the Chromecast Pro), there is indeed less need for proper hardware.

Source: Gamesindustry

Please support our page theGeek.games on Patreon, so we can continue to write you the latest gaming, movie and tech news and reviews as an independent magazine.
Become a Patron!