Xbox elitists are delusion by nature, hardware sales don't matter but without hardware you can't sell software.
Software operates on Hardware.
But yes Xbox has failed in both fronts.
Not just that; Game Pass's biggest platform for growth has been Xbox consoles; they signaled that it was stagnating on consoles late last year (maybe that changes this year?), but cited PC Game Pass growth.
Only problem is, PC Game Pass had ridiculously low subscriber counts compared to on Xbox. So unless we're talking like 1000% growth or stuff like that, the gains in absolute subscriber numbers isn't of too much significance. And then on the flipside, if Game Pass growth boons again thanks to games like Starfield, that's going to inevitably mean lower direct sales for those same games, because it's clear most people are choosing to play them via Game Pass.
Meaning Game Pass revenue needs to be high, meaning some of the loopholes and super-cheap deals have to start getting phased out or significantly reduced in how often they can be used. For example, I imagine repeated sign-ups for Game Pass trail deals and even for things like using other regions for stacking tricks will reinforce checks for what credit cards are being used to do them and the name of the holders of those cards, maybe also which issuing bank or making it so that if a registered person has a file on the system for having used an offer a time ago, they are unable to reattempt it until a set amount of time has passed regardless if they use another card or if they do, their bank will be contacted to verify who owns the card and if that person's the same as on MS's side in their database, they decline the card.
The wild thing though is, a lot of this self-bred product/services infighting MS created, could have been avoided if they didn't jump the gun on putting all their eggs in the Day 1 Game Pass basket, or all games Day 1 PC basket. They should've taken a more selective and case-by-case approach, but chose not to.
Then again, neither has Sony with the PS5.
Actually MS this year has been the first time I recall aggressive price-promotions in a holiday season since Covid started, and it didn't seem to do that much according to these numbers.
Have we ever had any data actually supporting this 'major' marketshare for XBS theory? I know people kept talking about how it's doing big/most sales (as well as labelling it brilliant strategy) but outside of Japan numbers which are roughly 50% split (and the totals for the year come out to about 1 summer month of NPD if that... so with shipments that low is it really statistically representative?), I don't recall seeing any other territory numbers in support of that.
Now true - XBS has been on sale many times in 22, and in stock more often than everything other than maybe Switch Lite - but that in of itself isn't evidence of its market share /shrug.
Maybe someone could reverse engineer estimates in NPD now, given revenue-placement for each month vs. leaked numbers - some kind of ratios could be estimated, though it'd still be far from exact.
Nope; it's generally been accepted the split of S to X is at least 60/40 favoring the S.
Anyhow, moving on from that and just speaking more in general regarding total global sell-through for consoles, I just want to mention something briefly.
Historically, US & UK have accounted for at least 60% of Xbox's global market share. For the 360 gen, it was closer to at least 65% between them.
With the new NPD leak numbers and knowing that historical ratio, we can actually figure out pretty well where Series sold-through are at as of end-of-2022. Even throwing in 2 million for Series in UK for 2022 (which I doubt was the case, so I'm being very generous there), total sold-through for Series would have been at 16.4 million - 16.9 million as of end of 2022.
In other words, they would have been tracking behind XBO by this point. There is no data to suggest Xbox's ROTW market share has suddenly grown significantly beyond the usual 40% (and again, the 40% for ROTW for Xbox might be generous). It's just statistically impossible that ROTW accounts for the majority of XBS sales, or that Series sold-through sales are beyond 20 million by this point (as another example).
I'm bringing this up because a lot of people were doubting my estimates when I started some months ago. That was in spite of me trying to be fair to Microsoft in those estimates, and we had to use a lot of circumstantial data from various sources along the way. But I never really thought of the market splits at that time; this time I've considered them and combined with these NPD number leaks, it's pretty easy to figure what actual sold-through for Series systems were at by at least end of 2022.
And I say all that so I can rub it in Aaron Greenberg's face, for trying to prop up a KNOWN inaccurate and biased source in VGChartz just to hype Xbox sales numbers. He knew VGChartz's global LTD numbers were wrong, but legitimized them anyway. Yes, Xbox Series did have a record April (if real sources are to be believed), but he didn't need to conflate that with VGChartz's false numbers. He set legitimate discussion on sales figures back by at least three months when he did such, all for the sake of temporary optics.
Do better, Aaron Greenberg.
But some people would rather make emotional arguments than data-driven ones when it comes to certain plastic boxes, I guess.