thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Thank COVID lockdowns, recession, and PS5/PS5 supply issues primarily. Plus gaming on the whole being a bigger market vs. 7th gen (I'm including mobile in that because I'm sure some mobile gamers may've picked up consoles during that time frame too. Quite a few likely game on multiple devices).
I wouldn't be surprised if he also took the Foxconn news from a few weeks ago and interpreted it as 4.4 million Xbox consoles, because a lot of people were doing that.
But it'd be mega-embarrassing to do that if you claim to be a sales analyst expert for the product in question.
At the current pace, they'll be lucky to reach 35 million two years from now. Or even by end of 2028, and that's assuming Series S & X are even still in production by then.
Not possible anymore. Microsoft as a corporation altogether (let alone Xbox) has a very negative image among a large swath of the average consumer market these days. Between declines in Surface hardware, declines & greed-focused business decisions for Xbox consoles, mass game dev firings and studio shutdowns, embarrassing failures like RedFall, Starfield, and Forza Motorsport.
Cancellations like Perfect Dark (which is basically another Scalebound moment for MS), enshitification of Windows OS, their obsessive push for forced AI, and for the more politically-minded (especially depending on your viewpoint), their direct involvement in providing the Israeli military tech & services to use against Palestinians. All of these things and more have IMHO made Microsoft more disliked today than back during the antitrust hearings decades back, because at least back then the worst you could claim about them were some anticompetitive/monopolistic business practices BTS. There was very little optics problems with MS from a consumer/public-facing POV during that time thanks to stuff like Windows '95 becoming insanely popular, and Wintel being in full force etc.
Nowadays, it's a whole host of baggage that's directly public-facing contributing to very poor optics for MS, in addition to some questionable business practices. Nintendo has NEVER been viewed in a generally derisive fashion by the public at any point of their history. At worst, they've just had a product fail in sales that people would laugh at, but their diehard fanbase still liked them. In any case, nothing about Virtual Boy, GameCube, or Wii U failing was tied to Nintendo appearing complicit in efforts to actively ruin their products among customers or tied to supporting highly questionable business practices, trends, or deeply contentious military operations linked to what some would call a genocide.
I'll go as far to say, MS's next Xbox system needs to ditch the Xbox brand naming altogether; it's basically pure toxic at this point and will actively damage what little opportunity for market success that product will have.
