There will for sure be deals this holiday season but we'll see just how good they are this time sure and Starfield didn't move that much hardware due to its weak reception, September had a boost but then it was back to normal by October so the lack of Starfield wouldn't have had a significant impact. 

You're right that the PS5 Pro will have a negative impact though it does also have things going for it this year that it didn't last year for example Black Ops 6 being on Game Pass is notable. Overall the situation is bad but it's not bad enough to make it more likely than not to fail to reach 5m for the year.

Of course it will. We only got numbers from Japan and it's smashing the Xbox one

Yes.

50 million as well unless something is done by MS that prevents it.

XBSX started the year with 400k month, after that it had 2 months with 320 and 340k, and then not only May was 230k, but April was 200k as well. Don't ignore it. This becomes a pattern. 5 months into the year and the XBSX is down 50% monthly. Even if the drops doesn't continue (which is still under debate) it will make 200k per month, which is exactly 2.5M by October. Last year the holiday was (november+december) was 2.8M but last year all the months were in the 400-600k range. Now the range has become anything around 200k. So double drop. 1.5M for the holiday is reasonable given the latest drops and latest sales performance for the console. My expectations are not pessimistic, they are realistic given how sales are going this year up to this point. If they don't make something to change it a little bit then I don't see it making more than 4M. I will be happy if the console can do 5 or even 6M this year, which is still not something good, but given it's drops lately it will surely be nice. Maybe if they do some very agressive sale for the whole holiday period on the Series S for 199$ and Series X for 399$ there is a chance to reach 5M, but 6M is out of the question. Just see this flat line and tell me how it is going to go up from nothing ?

The best I can see it does is to have some boost in the end and reach the XB1 line or somewhere close to it +/- 200k

There's no guarantee at all that it'll stay at 200k per month going forward. In fact it would be very surprising if June isn't better than May since as I said June is a significantly stronger month for console sales than May. I don't think expecting a nearly 50% drop in November+December is realistic based on just a couple bad months that weren't 50% down from the same months last year. May was 30% down and it's 30% down so far this year overall so the question is why would it decline a lot more than that for the 2nd half of the year?

For that image the reason it'll easily exceed the Xbox One line by the end is it barely having a holiday boost so it'll shoot up like the 360 one did. 

It's sold a lot more than 600k so far this year. As of the end of May the estimates from here have it at 1.5m.

There's no guarantee it will boost itself up to 300k per month too (5 week months I can see them doing ~ 250k) June will be slightly better, because it is 5 week month. However the sales for Europe are out and you can see them per week. The sales per week are on the same level they were for May - between 15 and 18K. So no improvement there. We will have US data soon enough too. The year for the XBSX is going for a finish around the 4M mark. It won't be 50% drop for the year, it will be something like 40% drop. And that is if it can stay to 200K or more per month. Hopefully it doesn't go under. And yes, it will shoot up like the 360 one did. No doubt about that. Simply from ~ 2.5M to ~ 4M. This is decent shoot up. More than half of the sales for just 2 months.

I still don't get why you're so sure it'll decline significantly more in November+December and the 2nd half of the year in general than it has for the year overall so far. I can accept the possibility of it failing to reach 5m in a worst cast scenario but there's no way it ends up closer to 4m than 5m by the end of the year so it's not gonna finish around 4m. For this month College Football 25 is coming out today and there's indications that it's gonna sell some consoles in the US so July could be a relatively decent month for the Xbox Series this year.

I still think 40 million is pretty much a lock and still have my signature at 48 million right now.

Hitting 50 or especially reaching high 50s like the One is going to be tough.

Xbox needs price cuts and a big GTA VI boost to hit above 44-49 million. The current discounts from Microsoft and retailers don't seem to be helping in the long run. PS5 and even the Blue Ocean and outdated Switch are still clobbering Xbox Series globally and in most markets. 

If Microsoft actually keeps Series S and X (or one of them) in production when the Fifth Xbox launches, they can probably eek out a 2-4 million at least as a budget-friendly console. While Microsoft has been happy to sell subscriptions and software on Xbox One even in 2024 and beyond, they dropped the hardware right as Xbox Series launched. That's a clear contrast from Xbox 360 hardware not getting discontinued until 2016 but Xbox 360 was a more successful and a bigger contrast in hardware design and ecosystem compared to the One to Series transition. 

Because so far the drop has been steady unless there was an event that partially softened the drop. Last year there was the launch of Starfield and the insane discounts in Christmas. If there's none of that like there wasn't in Black Friday last year you can expect a 50% drop from two years ago which is the par of course meaning ~4.5M this year give or take depending on management and external factors.

I don't know why in the world College Football would make a difference for Xbox when PS5 is so far ahead even in the USA. A good month or two ain't gonna change anything. And runaway hits like Palworld didn't change anything either even being exclusive to Xbox in consoles and being on Game Pass.

The trend is there, I honestly don't know why you are so dead set ignoring it.