Microsoft may well have revealed more or less voluntarily the Xbox sales scores for the year 2021. In its response document to the FTC complaint, the Redmond firm presents a graph of the market shares of Nintendo and Sony, in addition to his own. With a quick calculation, it is possible to determine how many Xboxes were sold last year.
Since the FTC’s complaint against it in connection with the Activision-Blizzard takeover, Microsoft has gone out of its way to justify its “minority” position on the video game market, the idea being to show that its acquisition project will not upset the dynamics already in place. A few days ago, the Redmond firm therefore published a 37-page document aimed at supporting this statement.
As often in this kind of business, the document reveals several crisp details on the state of the market and the strategy of the behemoths of the sector. In addition, there is a particularly interesting graph concerning the market shares of Microsoft and its competitors. Thanks to the latter, it is indeed possible to calculate how much the manufacturer sold Xboxes in 2021.
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Did Microsoft really sell 9 million Xboxes in 2021?
On this graph, therefore, Microsoft is necessarily behind its two competitors. We observe in particular a large lead from Sony in 2021, which isn’t all that surprising considering the manufacturer has sold twice as many PS4s as Xbox One. But things get really interesting when we look at the sales figures published by Nintendo and Sony over this period.
Sony has thus indicated that it has passed 14.7 million PS4 and PS5 the previous year. For its part, Nintendo prides itself on having delivered 23.7 million consoles. However, on this graph, the Japanese manufacturer occupies 50% of the market, which means that 47.34 million consoles were sold in total in 2021. By subtracting the cumulative sales of Sony and Nintendo from this figure, we obtain 8.97 million Xbox sold over this period.
But can we really trust this number? In October 2021, we learned in particular that Microsoft had sold 8 million Xbox Series X and S since their release. Later, another analysis claimed that this figure was ultimately only 6.7 million units. In other words, it is difficult to state with certainty that Microsoft didn’t manipulate the numbers to its advantage in its document, as long as no official data has been published.
