How many units does Xbox One need to sell to be considered a success?

[Mr Puggsly]

Normchacho said:
I mean...historically speaking it's sales will eclipse those of consoles that were considered successful.

But there's no doubt it's a failure overall.

They had to have expected it to outsell the 360, and probably by a comfortable margin.

It's not going to sell nearly as well as the 360, it's not going generate anywhere near the revenue they wanted. Lower than expected hardware sales, software sales and Gold subscriptions. Really early price cuts and deals, the nonexistent roi from Kinect 2.0 not to mention the enormous amount of money in advertising and added features (bc, 4k Blu Ray). Financially it's a huge failure for them, it didn't give them the control over their ecosystem that they wanted and it hurt their image in the industry.

That doesn't mean it's a bad system, but it's absolutely a failure.

Lowered expectations isn't an overall failure. I'm sure they would make changes if they could do it all over again, but they still found a fairly comfortable spot. I think Scorpio is proof of that.

You're right about price cuts, but they also designed X1 to not be a huge financial loser with modest specs. One reason they were able to cut the price drastically was the removal of Kinect.

You're trying to make BC sound like a desperation move, but in reality its something they did because they could, it was desired, and it people still buy 360 games. X1 BC doesn't just make X1 more desireable, it moves software. If Sony could figure out BC on PS4 I genuinely believe they would also offer it. But you know PS4 did get? PS2 emulation.

4K Blu Ray is not an expensive feature to add. But you're pretending it's because the competitor didn't do it.

Oh, I agree it hurt their image. But so did charging for online play, so did killing OG Xbox early, so did RRoD, etc. Xbox's competitors have also done things to hurt their image. But there is potential for recovery after screw ups, X1's image objectively improved since launch.