Before people start claiming stuff.
AMD: Nearly 30m (unknown source)
Take Two: exceeded 29m (IDG)
Ubisoft: exceeded 28m (Ubisoft Estimates)
PS4 sell through exceeded 18.5m
According to the above it means that Xbox One sell through could theoretically be anywhere between ~9.5m to ~11.5m. Xbox One sell through is likely to be over 10m based on figures we have from NPD/Gfk but we'll never know the actual number.
It's likely AMD are also Using IDG figures whilst Ubisoft are using their own estimate. IDG can also be taken as more reliable compared to Ubisoft. But as above, apart from Sony's 18.5m+, it's impossible to work out what sell through is for Xbox One. The rough figures above can act as a guide.
The below is something I wrote previously which includes rough numbers from NPD and Gfk in order to come to a hard minimum and soft minimum for Xbox One Sell through.
Ok, so as we can see above. In CY2013 which accounted for 2 months of tracking we say the USA sell through more than 1.8 million units to end users. Outside of the USA we saw a total of 1.2 million units sold through to end users in the rest of the world which consisted of 12 tier 1 countries. That's a ratio of 1.5:1 in favour of the USA.
So lets break it down a bit more. The UK launched with 364k, France with 126k and Germany with 100k units sold through to end users by the end of CY2013. This means that 3 markets outside of the USA sold through 590k units with the additional 9 Tier 1 markets selling through 610k to end users. This gives us total sell through of 3 million units to end users as confirmed by Microsoft.
Now, lets look at 2014, there was no doubt that sales would be very high in the USA and the price drop there ensured that. We saw sales for the year increase from 1.8m in 2013 to 4.4m for CY2014. This gives Xbox One a total of 6.2 million sold through in the USA as of December 31st 2014.
Now, lets look at tier 1, the 12 markets outside of the USA. Well the UK sold through approximately 790k units till the end of November 2014, giving us a cumulative total of 1150k till that date. In France we saw 290k units sold through in the full CY2014 giving us a cumulative total of 416k in France. In Germany we saw 170k sold through till November 2014 giving us a cumulative 270k.
Overall this takes us to ~8.65m sold through as a minimum based on the information above. (Everything below is not official numbers)
However, we are missing data for the UK and Germany for December. In December we can very safely say that the UK would have sold through more than 200k and Germany would have sold through more than 50k. It could easily be 300k+ or 350k+ combined but we'll go with the lower number of 250k as an estimate. That takes our cumulative total from 8.65m up to 8.90m which would cover CY2013 as well as CY2014 for the USA, UK, GER and FRA.
So 8.90m is very much confirmed. Now we need to add in the other tier 1 countries which account for a further 9 markets. In CY2013 these 9 markets shipped 610k cumulative. If we look at UK, GER and FRA for CY2014 we see these markets saw higher sales in 2014, this is because CY2014 is 12 months of tracking versus the launch of CY2013 which is 2 months of tracking. Here are some example,
The UK for example jumped from 364K in CY2013 to 800k+ in CY2014. France went from 126k in CY2013 to 290k in CY2014. As you can see, sales more than doubled in these regions.
So you would expect the 610k number for tier 1 in CY2013 to be higher in CY2014 due to the extended tracking period (12 months) and the trends seen in other tier 1 countries. Now I'm not saying tier 1 accounted for another 5 million or anything. All I'm saying is those extra 9 markets will easily have made up at least another 610k at the very very least. It will no doubt be higher but lets use 610k as a baseline.
So added to 8.90m + 0.61m we get 9.51m as an absolute minimum estimated guess for cumulative Xbox One sales in all tier 1 countries (13) until December 31st 2014. Now we have to look at tier 2 countries (which is 29 markets) and it'd be pretty obvious that whilst sales won't be massive, we'll still see some being bought. And whilst I don't want to throw an exact number around, it'll take cumulative sales over 10 million, especially when we low balled tier 1 numbers which will be higher than 610k.
