Some Sales Stats in France.

Xbox is really irrelevant but PC is big and these were the stats in 2022 for PC.

In 2022 Top Best Sellers on PC in France.

• 5th - Grounded - 54,213 Units.
• 6th - Sea of Thieves - 48,104 Units.
• 12th - Forza Horizon 5 - 28,135 Units.
• 13th - Age of Empires IV - 23,135 Units.

Weird that the only title with a real PC Pedigree in this list is also the lowest selling. But some good numbers here.

Tbf, it's a 2021 title. So not too surprising. Most sales would've happened the first month or two. It's more about consistent longevity for Age of Empires.

Also

Left is in $, right is in volume

Microsoft + Mojang + Bethesda are tiny even compare to ABK. Up to now I though of this transaction only with bird eye view and didn't stop to think it was also a great move at a smaller scale. Not only would ABK title help GamePass in general but for market like France and probably many other in Europe it will by itself be a drastic change in the proposed content vs what people want to play and so should single-handedly unlock most market were MS had a weak presence. 

Genre would play a part too, RTS is still big on PC but Survival titles are another level on PC...They always seem to hit it big no matter what, Lol. I'm not sure why it happens but it seems as though PC fans are always drawn towards Survival titles in large numbers. Forza Horizon 5 is beating it slightly, fair to say that Forza Horizon has overtaken almost every Xbox IP in popularity though, Lol.

Sea of Thieves though...It's still going strong after 5 years on the market, 48k in one market, 5 years after launch is impressive, alongside beating Forza Horizon 5 (by almost double) and Age of Empires IV despite them both being a lot more recent to market. Plus Sea of Thieves has already done 5m sales on Steam, Lol.

I can't remember when Rare said it exactly, I think it was before the PC launch, I think they said that the Game Pass/Sale split at the time was near 50/50. The player base is now 30m and the split is 54% in favour of Xbox, so that'd be 16.2m players roughly on Xbox. Has to be over 10m sales at this point, I'd not be surprised if it's closer to 15m than 10m considering nobody on PC seems to want to use Windows Store, Lol.

https://youtu.be/EP-hqXEAPHQ?t=848

Charla says they've reduced the minimum order quantity for physical disc.

"If a dev wants to do a couple thousand or a thousand discs for a special edition they can"

Sounds like the minimum order print is now 1,000 which is the same as PlayStation/Nintendo.

Series X Slim would be nice at least

That Microsoft lobbying at work.

Feel like it'd be better to look closer to home though and call out the poor behaviour of the FTC, Lol.

It's hilarious that FTC and CMA's "High-End Console Market" nonsense which excludes Nintendo Switch entirely is now starting to grow in usage which could actually backfire towards Sony considering it just makes them look even more dominant in the industry when we exclude Switch entirely.

"I'm told" oh yeah, definite lobbying going on here.