Downloads/player numbers are not copies sold, so you're wrong again. Like I said, MS biggest IP Halo, got handily OUTSOLD by TLOU, Spiderman, UC, God of War, even Horizon. There's no coming back from that.

PS5 is selling 2x Xbox so you're wrong for the third time.

And a final laugh, PS5 is expected 23M next FY, making it the best selling year in Playstation history in only its 2nd full year.

I mean I would wait for Sony to say such things.
And no, the 23M FY has been there for more than a year and considering how they are hitting all their FY targets, chip production is procured a year in advance, I'm not going to expect big changes at all unless explicitly said to shareholders.

Wait, Sony only plans to ship 23m consoles lifetime by the end of March 2023? I could have sworn that 23m lifetime estimate was for the end of March 2022. Well they should easily hit 23m lifetime by the end of March 2023, Xbox might even hit 23m lifetime by then as well, considering they are already over 10m based on VGC numbers and will probably sell at least another 1m over the course of December considering how big Series S shipments have been these final 2 weeks before Christmas (been in stock for more than a week straight on Amazon US now, and outselling Switch OLED there). Meaning Xbox would only need to ship about 12m consoles over the course of 15 months from January 2022 to March 2023 to hit 23m lifetime by the end of March 2023, should be doable as long as they have some good production contracts; Starfield will be capable of moving alot of Xbox's next Holiday, especially if MS is smart and bundles it with Series S and Series X and/or drops to Series S to $250 next Holiday.  I could see MS hitting 23m lifetime by the end of March 2023 and Sony maybe even hitting 33m lifetime by then personally, but alot depends on what production will look like for each of them this year, maybe the semi-conductor shortage will get worse in 2022 instead of better. 

Xbox vs PS exclusive sales comparisons are kind of pointless is a Gamepass world, MS cares about player counts now, not sales. But I think some of those games have potential for both big sales and big player counts though Gamepass. Fable 3 sold 5m+ copies on 360, and there is potential for this upcoming Fable reboot to grow the series to new heights, considering the series is going open world and is being helmed by Playground Games, a studio renowned for both their high metacritic scores and their technical proficiency. Playground's Forza Horizon 4 reached 24m players as of a year ago and is rumored to be close to 30m players now, could a this new Fable by them reach 30m players lifetime as well? Hellblade 1 wasn't a huge seller, only moving around 2m units lifetime, but the two Hellblade 2 trailers released so far have really caught alot of people by surprise, the 1st one got many millions of views on Youtube and this 2nd one was considered to be one of the best games shown on the 2021 Game Awards, I wouldn't be surprised if Hellblade 2's player counts at least quadruple the sales of Hellblade 1. As for Avowed, many RPG fans have been hungry for a new Elder Scrolls for a long time, and Avowed could prove to be a good way to whet the appetite of those Elder Scrolls fans, considering the similarities between the two (Obisidian and Bethesda having worked together in the past, both having 1st person combat with the ability to wield both spells and swords in different hands, both being medieval fantasy, etc.). Perfect Dark, at the height of it's popularity, was one of Rare's biggest sellers, and MS has been amassing top tier AAA talent to build this reboot, it could potentially prove to be quite big. 

And of course those are only 4 of the games we are likely to see from Xbox during the middle years of this generation. Other games we can expect to see from Xbox's 23 studios and 30+ teams during those middle years include id's next project (rumored to be a new Quake), State of Decay 3, Compulsion's new IP, Double Fine's first Xbox exclusive, the next game from Tango's 2nd team (rumored to be The Evil Within 3), inXile's new AAA RPG, The Outer Worlds 2, Contraband, and perhaps some surprise exclusives coming from 2nd/3rd party studios that haven't even been announced or leaked yet. 

Sony has big exclusives, I'll give you that much, Uncharted, The Last of Us, Spider-Man, Horizon, and God of War have each proven to be big sellers, with at least one game in each of those series rumored to be over 20m sales now as of 2021. But, those big blockbusters also take a long time to develop, which means some of those developers may only release 1 or 2 games at most this entire generation. Xbox clearly has a 1st party advantage in terms of output capabilities, MS has 23 studios now and 30+ individual teams between those 23 studios, and they may acquire more studios soon. Xbox may soon double the number of AAA teams that Sony has. And it's not like Xbox doesn't have big series of their own, Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 have both already proven themselves to be big sellers, and Bethesda will be releasing 2 games this generation, Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6, both games that are capable of 20m+ sales on Xbox and PC combined most likely, considering how well Bethesda's Fallout 4 and Skyrim sold.

I work in logistics, and everything I'm hearing is that the Global Supply Chain Crisis is expected to continue throughout 2022.  So, I'd temper expectations about how many more next gen consoles will be available next year than they were able to pump out this year.

If getting outsold 2 to 1 by the Nintendo Switch during Black Friday week, and outsold 3 to 1 by the Switch the week after (while selling less than 2,000 units in all of Japan the same week) is "hitting all their FY targets", that should tell you something about what to expect during another supply constrained year.  As the newcomer on the market in its 2nd holiday in 2018, the Switch was within a few hundred thousand of PS4 during Black Friday, and separated by less than a hundred thousand the week after, and then overtook the PS4 every week by a significant margin for the remainder of the year.  That's what you would have expected the PS5 to be doing right now if there were no supply issues.   Going back to the PS4's 2nd holiday in 2014, it was selling an average of 725,778/week throughout December.  The PS5 averaged 413,429/week so far this month.  That's over 300,000 behind per week so far this month.  So again, I would temper your expectation regarding 2022 being a record setting year for PlayStation.  I don't base this on demand, or what Sony hopes, but on the realism of the Global Supply Chain Crisis and the Semiconductor Shortage.

1. Yeah, both of those numbers seem doubtful to me. PS5 will need to sell about 6m over the course of 4m months to hit 23.5m shipped lifetime before the end of March, last VGC week they sold 428k, assuming the rest of the December weeks are also about 400k, PS5 will be at around 17.2m sales end of 2021. They would need to sell around 400k console per week from January-March 2022 to hit 22.5m sold through, 23.5m shipped by the end of March. Before the Holiday the PS5 weekly production was around 250k per week as I recall, far short of 400k per week. As for that 2nd numbers, 23m next financial year, that sounds insane to me, most experts are predicting that the semi-conductor shortage will last throughout all of 2022 and into early 2023, how are Sony supposed to increase from 16m production in 2021 to 23m production in 2022 while the shortages are on-going? That just doesn't sound feasible to me. Sony already adjusted their estimates down once, I suspect they will again before long.
2. My point is that IP's can grow, we can't judge how well games like Fable reboot, Perfect Dark reboot, and Hellblade 2 will sell based on the performance of earlier games in the series. A perfect case and point is the Witcher franchise, Witcher 2 sold just 6m copies between it's 2011 launch and 2015 when Witcher 3 released. Witcher 3 has now sold over 30m copies. Franchises can grow in popularity over time, just look at Uncharted, Uncharted 4 sold more than double the copies that earlier Uncharted games sold. In fact each main Fable game that has released so far has grown in sales over the previous, from about 2.5m on Fable 1, to 4.3m on 2, to 5.1m on 3, for all we know Fable reboot from Playground could emulate the recent strong sales of Playground's Forza Horizon 5, doubling Fable 3 in sales and quadrupling Fable 3 in player count from Gamepass.
3. Well, let's look at the 2 in terms of AAA teams. Sony has 2 AAA teams at Insomniac and 2 at Naughty Dog last I checked, they have 1 AAA team at SSM, 1 at Bend, 1 at Bluepoint, 1 at Guerilla Games, 1 at Sony San Diego (though their MLB series is no longer Sony exclusive), and 1 at Sucker Punch. By my count, that is 10 AAA teams for Sony. MS meanwhile has 1 AAA team at 343, Coalition, The Initiative, inXile, Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Rare, Turn 10, id, and Machine, and 2 AAA teams at Playground, Arkane, Bethesda, Zenimax Online, and Tango. By my count that is 20 AAA teams for MS currently, though 2 of them are working on games that will stay multiplat, Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76. MS still had the advantage in terms of AAA 1st party quantity over Sony, we'll have to see how those numbers change over the next few years as MS and Sony make more acquisitions and build up more of their current studios with additional teams or expand current teams/studios from AA to AAA size.

You've misunderstood.

16M for this FY (ends Mar 2022)

23M for next FY (ends Mar 2023)

Fable, Hellblade, PD, Avowed will all be outsold by a single Spiderman game or God of War. They simply aren't big IPs atm.

I'm not sure I would call Insomniac's VR team AAA, but maybe they are. Last I heard Neil Druckmann was still deciding rather he wanted to do a new IP next or TLOU 3, did he ultimately decide on TLOU 3? I must have missed that. Either way, I thought the his Last of Us team was finishing up TLOU Factions Multiplayer before moving on to their next AAA singleplayer project, but maybe you're right and it's 2 entirely separate teams. You may be right about SSM, I remember they cancelled a new IP last gen, which was why Stig Asmussen (director of GoW 3) quit SSM and ended up directing Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order at Respawn, and I was rather annoyed by that new IP cancellation as the leaks about it sounded interesting, so it would be cool to see SSM working on something new again. Housemarque is definitely AA last I checked, unless they are planning to expand to AAA before their next-game, I believe they only have about 80 devs currently. I was debating rather or not to classify Media Molecule as AA or AAA, their production values clearly aren't on the same level as some of Sony's other studios, so I ultimately decided to keep them off my list, but they may actually be AAA. London Studio makes somewhat lower budget VR games last I checked, no AAA unless something has changed. I thought I read that Firesprite was going to be a support studio for Sony rather than making their own games, but if you're right and they are going to make their own games and have 2-3 teams, that was a very good grab for Sony. I definitely forgot Polyphony on my list, my bad on that. Isn't VASG a support studio and that AI machine learning tech is going to be used across all Sony studios?

I don't think there has been any single year where Sony sold 60m 1st party games, that seems outrageous honestly. Rumor about a year ago was that Uncharted 4, TLOU 1, God of War (2018), Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Spider-Man were all at around 20m lifetime or more, but those sales were all spread out over several years, even in 2018 where they would have had the launches of Spider-Man and God of War as well as Horizon residual legs from the previous year, it seems like it would have been difficult to move 60m 1st party games in 1 year.

Halo is alot more than 5m, Halo 5 sold 5m in just the first 3 months, and according to an industry analyst, Microsoft reps told him that Halo 5's lifetime sales were comparable to other games in the series. Halo Infinite is of course difficult to compare to earlier games in the franchise due to it's split singleplayer multiplayer, and F2P multiplayer, but based on Amazon chart performance and stuff it seems like even the paid $60 singleplayer is selling very well (currently at #24 on Amazon US for instance, even though like 70% of Xbox software sales are digital these days, plus people who are choosing to play on Gamepass instead of buying the campaign). And the multiplayer has been hugely successful so far, I wouldn't be surprised if MS soon announces that Halo Infinite singleplayer + MP is over 10m players already, much like Forza Horizon 5. I would say that that Forza Horizon, Halo, Fallout, Starfield, and Elder Scrolls all have 20m+ players potential for Xbox including Gamepass players, and some of those may even pass 30m players, for instance Skyrim did over 30m on sales, so I see no reason why the next Elder Scrolls can't do more than 30m on players including Gamepass, and Forza Horizon 4 was at 24m players a year ago and is rumored to be close to 30m players now. And like I said, some other Xbox IP's could grow in popularity this gen, much like we saw Sony IP's grow in popularity this past gen, maybe something else can surpass 20m players this gen, the rumored Zenimax Online Star Wars game perhaps. I don't see Spider-Man getting 3-4 games before Elder Scrolls 6 is likely to launch in 2025 or 2026, unless you are including Spider-Man 1 and Miles Morales in that count, meaning you are referring to all Spider-Man games released between Skyrim (2011) and TES 6 (2025-2026), which while accurate, discounts the fact that Bethesda now has 3 IP's they will be rotating between unless MS/Bethesda decide to move each of the 3 behind separate Bethesda studios, which may happen.

In terms of first party development, Sony is still in a more dominant position than Microsoft despite the Zenimax acquisition, if we consider the amount of high profile IP's, multimedia adaptation & extensive library dating back to the original Playstation. Microsoft's only development advantage at the moment is sheer volume of games. If SIE acquires as aggressively as Sony Pictures or Sony Music, Playstation could very well catapult their inhouse production into 25 - 30+ studios, taking away Microsoft's volume advantage before it can even manifest on the market. And that's not taking into account how Sony is organically growing most of their teams, where Playstation still has a major advantage over on Xbox, if we compare home grown studios over the generations.

Also expecting these PS IP's to drop in sales/popularity just because it isn't the PS4 generation is wishful thinking tbh. Gran Turismo, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon & TLOU have been massive sellers from their first title, while staples like God of War & Uncharted have grown into juggernaut franchises over time, while Sony's partnership with Disney gives them exclusive access to some of the biggest IP's today. Good to see the bundle excuse is ready to go though lol.

True, but s streaming and downloads are kind of the future? Look at the music industry, no one really just buys copies of music, they subscribe and download and stream hundreds of songs. This has taken over the engagement, Microsoft is simply following an easy biz strategy. And quite frankly gamepass has gained major traction. According to vgc Xbox is at 10-11 million while ps5 is at 15 - 16 million. And they are selling almost the same amount t right now WW. And it’s looking likely that Xbox will take December like they took November from PlayStation in the biggest gaming market. Don’t be surprised with easily available series s and switch stock if ps5 stays around that 400-500k number it’s been doing all year almost, and Xbox breaks a million in the US.