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Salnax on 02 June 2021
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I'm curious how you think these numbers will play out.

  • The PS4 is sitting at just over 115 million sales: 38M in North America, 48M in Europe, 9M in Japan, and 20M elsewhere
  • The X1 is sitting at just over 50 million sales: 32M in North America, 12M in Europe, and 6M in the rest of the world
  • Assuming that these consoles only sell a bit more overall, that's a combined total of maybe 175 million consoles sold.
  • Your hypothesis suggests that, assuming the market remains stable, the Xbox will grow from roughly 50 million to about 90 million sales
  • If the XS DOES beat the PS5 in North America by that 2 to 1 ratio you mentioned, that would shift 15 million sales from PlayStation to Xbox, making the balance 65 million vs 100 million.
  • Your bullet point concerning Europe basically says the only big change will be in the UK, so I looked for some UK data. I couldn't find a complete set of data, but I did find that through 2018, the PS4 sold about 5.4 million units and the X1 sold 4.6 million. If we assume that the two consoles sold another combined 2 million (since in 2018 the combined sales were a bit over 1 million but were declining), we can assume final sales of roughly 6.5 million and 5.5 million. I can hypothetically see Xbox getting some of those sales, but even if PlayStation loses nearly half of its market share, that's only another 3 million for Xbox, moving the balance to 68 million vs 97 million.
  • In Japan, let's say that the entire non-Switch console market is cut in roughly half again. It was 30.0 million in Gen 6, 24.9 million in Gen 7, and 12.8 million in Gen 8, so that would basically remove 3 million PS5 sales from existence. The balance is still 68 million vs 94 million.
  • At this point, you're basically depending on GamePass to not only be popular, but SO popular that it singlehandedly convinces 15 to 20 million PlayStation fans to get Xbox instead.

I'm not saying this is impossible. But it requires Xbox to win every battle they pick by a decisive lead to simply break even.



Love and tolerate.