Intrinsic said:
This is why I find the whole gamepass talk funny. It's like there is this collective mind wipe going on. NA is Xbox's strongest territory, if they are doing that poorly there imagine how it must be everywhere else. And somehow, gamepass is gonna change all this. The only reason the Xboxbrand still exists is that its backed by a company is big as MS. If the XSX/S doesn't do much better than the XB1 and gamepass doesn't take hold, I think it's safe to say MS will pull the plug on the Xbox brand. Or just turn it into a service and stop making consoles in the traditional sense. And become a multiplatform publisher for their IPs. Xbox simply needs more than NA to survive. Especially in any gen when it doesn't have a commanding lead in that region (like the 360 gen). |
That would be a terrible thing for Xbox to drop consoles (IMO).
Thankfully, I think it's a bit early for this kind of doom-and-gloom talk.
Very early in July, Xbox Ones were becoming increasingly rare to find in many different regions. So much so that rumors sprung up that Xbox Ones were being discontinued (https://segmentnext.com/2020/07/10/rumor-xbox-one-sales-discontinued-make-way-next-generation/). On Xbox reddit there were a few threads of unavailability started.
Finally, a week later MS confirmed they had discontinued One X and One S all-digital (https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/16/21327330/microsoft-xbox-one-x-s-digital-edition-discontinued).
We already know that up to this point, Xbox One sales were up YoY 22.4%. So there is a healthy demand. What I believe is happening is that the higher demand (due to Covid) depleted the stocks of Xbox Ones faster than MS anticipated. When MS had discontinued the models, they probably assumed that the remaining stock would last them well until the end of the year. But the stock sold pretty much faster than anticipated. On Amazon US I see only used Xbox Ones for sale. Barely any brand new models.
