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AJNShelton on 19 April 2021
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Illusion said:

Barton said:

Respectable? I actually find it embarrassing after almost 8 years. Nintendo just crossed the 80 millionth unit sold in less than half of that time period and Sony is close to 120 million within the same timeline. No wonder Microsoft is… wait for it, embarrassed to show sales figures, because it is, well… embarrassing.

I know what you're saying.  Certainly the XB1 did not sell well as a standalone console released in the past decade, especially given its length of time on the market.  If this had been the 90's, 50 million would have been regarded as really solid sales for an 8 year console but the number of gamers out there buying consoles has massively expanded since then.  In this decade, successful consoles really need to hit 70-80 million to be given the same regard as consoles that sold 40 million back in the 90s.

That being said, we need to understand that MS is not a typical game company like Sony or Nintendo.  XBox is really only one facet of Microsoft's gaming domain.  If a person buys a PC for gaming, then this is basically guaranteed to be an MS system and probably (over its lifetime) will be almost as much of a profit maker for MS than an XBox sale would be.  As a result, MS is more than willing to cannabalize their own sales of XBox to facilitate PC users since the company wins in both ballparks.  MS makes decisions again and again that demonstrate that winning the console war is not their objective with the XBox.  I think a company like Nintendo would be a lot more panicked if the Switch took 8 years to hit 50 million and would regard this as a failure, but my feeling is that MS seems quite happy with the current situation for XBox and are not taking any drastic actions to get XBox out of third place. 

Maybe I am wrong about my assessment of MS, but this is just my feeling given my very limited knowledge of XBox and Microsoft's priorities in the gaming market.  I just know that MS wouldn't release their best exclusives on PC a couple of years after they release on XBox if they were driven to get people to buy XBox consoles.  I enjoy Halo but if I wanted to play the game, I would never buy a XBox since I know that it would eventually come to PC in a couple of years anyways.  Imagine if Nintendo did that with BotW.

Since the biggest gaming platform is both PC and mobile (since everybody have a PC and a smartphone nowadays), it would be better for MS to battle with Steam instead of Sony. And I believe most of Game Pass users are on PC.

I mean, I cannot imagine MS not being angry to see Steam stealing its thunder by having most of the gamers buying games on its platform even if it's MS which own the OS.