Information from: European game sales up slightly in December | European Monthly Charts | GamesIndustry.biz

Hardware

- 1.27m consoles sold, 16% up over the same four-week period in 2022.
- PS5 is first with sales 66% higher than last year
- Switch is second with sales 7% lower than last year
- Xbox is third with sales 19% lower than last year

Please note the YoY hardware comparisons appear to be a 4-week period in 2023 vs a 4-week period in 2022 for comparison sake. December this year is a 5-week month however.

(Console hardware sales cover Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.)

Software

- 26.6m games sold, sales improved 3.6% compared with the same four-week period in 2022.
- EA FC24 first by a considerable margin, sales 11.5% lower than Fifa 23 in December.
- CoD is second, overall performance is below the level of previous Call of Duty releases
- Avatar debut's 6th, selling around half of what AC Mirage managed in October.

(Digital data includes games sold in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and United Kingdom.)

(Physical data includes all games, but only those sold in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.)

Mario Kart 9 is going to be the most important game for the Nintendo Switch's successor.

Damn, honestly an incredible hold for Switch, especially after being down by a third in November.

Guess we'll also get some year end results at some point?

Do you have to make a disclaimer if you want to talk about Xbox sales? Or some people is going to take it as an attack anyway?

It's a very good hold, Nintendo always does well in the Christmas period. I did expect YoY drops in December to be much less than November.

Considering it's a 5-week month the Switch should be able to break the 1m mark in Europe for December and I'm guessing right now around 3.2m global. We should have NPD results in the next three days.

What are you betting on with Xbox sales? If it continues like this in 2024, the Xbox will sell a maximum of 50 million in its lifetime

For Xbox, that's actually not bad (it would be just 8 million shy of the One). Unfortunately, with the way things are looking, it may not even reach that. The next two years are going to be key in this regard.

Very roughly, I'm guessing around 400k in the whole of Europe for December. A very poor result. The Xbox One sold 629k in Europe in December 2016.

If we assume that people no longer buy consoles for games, then the Xbox won't even come close to 50 million. All the upcoming Xbox exclusives no longer need to calculated into the predictions, they should be treated as they don't or won't exist.

The november month were counted only for 4 weeks, which I am not sure if it's okay. There were disappointing results but it was till 25th november, so 5 days left out which could made the things better .. Are the previous years also with 4/5 days left out of the month for November ?

Also even if December is 5 weeks we can calculate the minimum numbers for each consoles even though it's for 4 weeks given those percentages ..

• Switch - 1.12M
• PS5 - 1.24M
• XBOX - 345k

Again that's guaranteed minimum floor of what they all sold in Europe in December 2023, as those numbers comes for 4 weeks only, so maybe about 20% higher should be the final numbers ..