Xbox Not Pulling Out of Console Market, Reportedly

A lot of people are speculating over the future of the Xbox brand, especially after the news last week that the brand will reportedly soon release its IP on other consoles. This sent a lot of people into a frenzy on both sides of the “console wars” trenches: “The sky is falling, how dare they stop making consoles and releasing on PlayStation,” as well as, “Why would anyone want those Xbox IP on my beloved PlayStation, how disgusting.” All of which is before anything could be confirmed. Well, this week we’ll get more details.

However, as part of Shannon Liao’s Substack post on Friday which kicked off with IGN Unionizing, Liao reports that Xbox held an internal meeting last Tuesday on these rumors. As mentioned before, the rumors swirled that Starfield would be moving onto PlayStation sometime after the upcoming DLC, the recently shown-off Indiana Jones will too after Xbox and PC releases, and other details that have been leaked recently. Well, part of the calming of the storm was Uncle Phil putting out that tweet noting an upcoming update sometime this week.

Internally though, according to Liao, the head of Xbox had to make a statement about the console market itself. The report states that there is no plan to stop making consoles whatsoever at this moment, and that’s kind of what I had expected given that Game Pass and Xbox Cloud Gaming subscriptions don’t currently have an external partner. However, it is also worth noting that the Take-Two Interactive Q3 reports came in and there is an interesting detail in the 45 pages of infographics and stats so boring they’d put Count von Count to sleep.

While Xbox isn’t in the business of fueling the console wars by publishing console sales numbers, it isn’t too hard to work out those numbers with a little bit of external help. On page 9, “Gaming Industry has Strong Secular Tailwinds” – yes, I am doing a motion that I’m not allowed to talk about – there is a section on “gen 9 consoles.” In it, there is a note that 77 million Gen-9 consoles have been sold as of December 31st, 2023.

Now a little bit of digging and know-how lets us see that Gen-9 consoles are the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with Sony reporting 50 million sales of the PS5 in December. This means PlayStation has outsold Xbox 2:1 once again, following it happening with the PS4, as found in court documents back in 2022. I’m not calling for doom and gloom, and I honestly don’t want to see the Xbox console go away, but I will say that I think there needs to be some sort of pivot at the house Jonathan Blackley built.

We’ll find out exactly what Xbox is planning to do in the coming year soon enough. There is no word (at the time of writing) when or where this news will drop. The Xbox Wire is fairly silent on this so far, and there is no word on Twitter from Xbox or Phil himself. As I say, I think a pivot needs to take place, the 2:1 ratio isn’t the sign of the end times, but I’m sure some will try to twist it as such.