<Sigh>
@Heisenberg007 we might have some egg on our face
Don't worry though, all our work still means something
So...about these numbers....Welfare
might be right. At least in my case, I was factoring ROTW's numbers based on the US/UK figures, but messed up the scaling. It's not that ROTW is 40% of the US/UK numbers...it should be that US/UK represent 60% of the total.
In other words, if US/UK are at best 11.236 million, and ROTW accounts for 40% of Xbox market share (at best), then the total should be 8.98 for ROTW, not
half that. Meaning sold-through by end of 2022 would be at 20.22 million. Meaning in the
best-case scenario, Welfare is correct; they would be tracking ahead of XBO, by about 2 million in that scenario.
However,
realistically ROTW would only account for upwards 40%; again, it accounted for less than 35% in the 360 gen, and probably even less than that in XBO gen considering how badly MS did in non US/UK markets. So a percentage gain of upwards 8% to reach 40% is very optimistic. However, I have reasons to suspect ROTW is not even accounting for 40%, because if it were, and Xbox Series were in fact tracking ahead of XBO by over 2 million,
why did MS not provide a PR statement in their earnings call earlier this week?
ANY good news on that front would be worth sharing; they did it with Game Pass growth despite not giving numbers there either so, why no statement Series are tracking ahead of XBO? I think it's pretty simple to figure the reason why, is because they aren't, and that's probably because ROTW isn't close to 40% of the market share. The lack of a PR statement on Xbox sales tracking ahead of XBO still leads me to think, then, that they lost a LOT of ROTW market in XBO gen.
The source I'll be using
here is Statista (a couple people have told me they use VGChartz for some numbers so it's possible these estimates could be too high, but generally they seem like a good source, them and VGSales): for XBO gen they give 31.58 million in US and 12.82 million in Europe. Combined that is 44.4 million. Meanwhile, ROTW only accounts for 6.02 combined. Percentage-wise, that would mean ROTW share dropped from > 35% in 360 gen, to under 15% in XBO, meaning US & Europe accounted for over 85% of XBO's sales.
Now, I can't find UK's numbers specifically, so we'll have to go with 360's UK sales, which according to
this source were 8.4 million lifetime. Meanwhile, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) totals were 13.7 million. I think it is probably fair to say Europe accounted for at least 60% of those sales, so that is 8.2 million. From this, we can say that the UK accounted for over 50% of all European 360 sales. So what we can do from here is take the 12.82 million European figure for XBO and cut it by 51%, that will probably give us a low-end for XBO's UK numbers if they didn't drop there percentage wise relative rest of Europe that gen. That gives ~6.54 million XBOs in UK. Add the other 6.28 million remaining to ROTW and that brings ROTW (including non-UK Europe) to 12.3 million. Subtract 6.28 million from 44.4 million and that gives a US & UK number of 38.12 million. 12.3 million of 38.12 million is roughly 32.5%. Meaning ROTW (non US/UK) accounted for around 32.5% of XBO's sales.
So let's say Xbox Series have in fact seen some growth in ROTW...realistically how much do you expect that to have been? ROTW was slightly
under 35% in 360 gen, ~ 32.5% in XBO gen. That's a 2.5% difference. They're not going to suddenly get a 10%, even 8% reversal two years into the new generation when their 2022 was very weak and we have some evidence from select non US/UK markets showing just how low totals actually are. At best, ROTW would probably have seen a 5% gain, or up to 37.5%. And with that, we can figure where things actually are for the Series consoles.
Realistically, UK sales are at absolute best probably around 1.86 - 2.1 (maybe 2.2) million. Again, XBO did 6.54 million in UK, that's an average of 934.2K units per year. 360 did 8.4 million, an average of 1.05 million per year. We got the general statement Xbox Series are "tracking ahead of XBO" back early 2022 but MS never specified regional breakdown. For all we know, Series could be tracking behind XBO in the UK market and other parts of Europe, but ahead of it in the US. It's all a crapshoot, because they don't provide real meaningful numbers. Anyway...adding the peak of that range (2.1 million) to the leaked US figures gives 10.836 million. ROTW accounting for a peak 37.5% of the rest of the share gives a total of
18.96 million sold-through by end of 2022. However, if the UK peak is closer to 1.86 million, then it reduces US/UK totals to 10.596 million, and total numbers to
18.543 million sold-through by end of 2022.
Yes those are both cases where they are (slightly) ahead of XBO launch-aligned but then let's look at the obvious circumstantial evidence.
Why were there no PR figures given by Microsoft at the recent earnings call, noting Series are tracking ahead of XBO, to soften the otherwise bad news on hardware sales decline? It doesn't take much to figure this out: they gave no such news, because most likely,
their numbers are lower than the ones I just gave. Meaning It's either the UK numbers are much lower than I gave, or the ROTW total is lower than I afforded, or some combination of both factors.
Any way you slice it, that is the most likely scenario: they are probably tracking behind XBO launch-aligned either way, due to lack of any mention of tracking ahead in the earnings call where such news would have helped offset the bad news of hardware revenue decline. We can talk about how far behind they are tracking relative to XBO; personally I would say not terribly far behind. But the realistic possibility is that they are in fact tracking behind, and the other sources you are pointing to claiming Xbox hit 20+ million months ago or whatever, are doing the same estimates we're doing here in this thread, working with a lot of the same data & trends. Of course, some biases may lead to bullish emphasis on certain things over others; I was a bit guilty of that myself and didn't scale earlier numbers correctly, but I've gone back and fixed that with this post.
Even having done that, though, the fact is with what info and data we can find, going back to 360 even, there is little reason to think between that and circumstantial evidence that Series are tracking ahead of XBO. If I had to take a guess, the UK numbers are probably closer to 1.65 million, and ROTW is probably closer to 36% of Series sales (36.5% max) rather than 37.5%.
That would have put Xbox Series sold-through at 17.863 million by end of 2022, just
slightly behind XBO. The lack of ANY mention of console sales at least tracking ahead of XBO on Tuesday really more or less seals the deal that they are behind, even if it's by less than 200K. If they can get the 1P content (AA and AAA) coming regularly this year, get more Series X units out there, do better marketing/advertising and whatnot, they can probably start tracking ahead of XBO again and maybe comfortably so deeper into the year.
However, that's a big "if" and they will have to do a LOT to make it happen, especially considering Sony & Nintendo have lots of big guns coming this year, and big 3P titles are dropping this year too (given Sony have marketing deals with most of the big ones, that doesn't help Xbox, and generally the platform that's already better off, benefits much more from multiplats anyway). None of them are standing still for Microsoft, so MS have to go above and beyond.
Can they do it? I guess we'll see.
