Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced at the company’s full year earnings call that the Xbox Series X and S were the fastest-selling consoles in Xbox history. Now, a year later and nearly two years into the consoles’ life cycles, he’s affirmed this continues to be true.
While this sounds a bit obvious, what Nadella’s really saying here is that sales of the newest Xbox consoles haven’t really slowed down significantly since they launched, at least not compared to past Xbox consoles.
His exact words were that Microsoft has “sold more consoles life-to-date than any previous generation of Xbox.” So almost two years in, none of the other Xboxes had sold as many units as the current generation.
That’s a lot of Xboxes, especially given the many challenges the ongoing chip shortage has presented in getting the dang things on the shelves in the first place.
Nadella also mentioned a few other numbers. He reminded us that Xbox consoles have been the next-gen console market leader for three quarters in a row now (basically, they’ve been outselling PS5 for the last three quarters). And, hardware aside, Xbox’s xCloud seems to be doing all right too — over four million people have streamed Fortnite to date on xCloud, Nadella said, including over one million people who were brand new to the xCloud ecosystem.
That’s all good news for Xbox, though it came alongside the announcement that gaming revenue for the quarter was down 7% year-over-year, content and service revenue was down 6%, while hardware revenue dropped 11%. While none of that sounds sparkling, it also shouldn’t be shocking — last quarter the company was still riding the high of a massive hardware sales surge, and it’s normal to see hardware sales gently decline as time goes on.
As for content revenue, without a ton of blockbuster releases hanging around, Xbox will probably have to wait for October or later for some big releases to bolster those numbers further.
Xbox is projecting that its current quarter (running from July through September) will see a year-on-year drop in the low-to-mid single digits due to declines in first party content, while console revenue and Game Pass subscriptions are expected to rise.
Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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