Horizon Forbidden West has more views on YouTube than Halo Infinite, and the latter became an internet meme. This means something.
Oh please.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons has 2.9m views on YouTube compared to
Horizon: Zero Dawn's 8.2m. Animal Crossing has sold
over 13 million copies in four months since its launch and is a fucking
juggernaut. Horizon: Zero Dawn has
sold 10 million in
three years.
GTAV has surpassed over 115 million sales - it's trailer has
16m views. YouTube views don't mean a single thing. As far as your data points go, take a step outside of your bubble. You're on a video game forum for that hardest of the hardcore, looking at gaming communities that the average console user wouldn't even know existed. On a pie graph, the sub-sub-percent that we represent wouldn't be enough of a sliver to warrant its own label.
With the Series X taking the power crown for the hardcore with disposable income, and Lockheart apparently price cutting like nothing we've ever seen for a new console, all backed by the crazy value of Gamepass, Microsoft are making a pure numbers play. We haven't seen this before - this is what we call market disruption. The last time Microsoft did this they invented Xbox Live and changed gaming forever, laughing all the way to the bank. The "Netflix of games" is a powerful marketing term, and Microsoft are pushing it. Hard. They're selling to the hardcore, but they're focused on casuals, the cost-conscious, the folks who wait for the mid-gen price drop with the slim revision... only they're not waiting for the mid-gen to target them: they're hitting them with everything they've got right from the get go. Next-gen gaming on Lockheart for the rumoured USD$200 and access to hundreds of games for USD$10.00 a month? That's insane value - so much so that people are concerned that fucking
Microsoft can't afford it. And that insane level of value will hit home for legions of consumers who waited to mass purchase the price-dropped consoles in every other generation.
The Xbone tried to swindle gamers under Mattrick. The Xbox Series X and Series S is giving gamers everything they've ever asked for under Spencer. The notion that the next Xboxes aren't going to do better than the Xbone is the one that has no evidence. Do I think it'll beat PlayStation? No - brand's too established, and the franchises they have are all doing amazingly well. But - do I think Xbox is going to do very, very well this generation - much better than the Xbone? Absolutely. And I've seen nothing to signify anything else.