I am being honest when I ask you this, how many of those got so disappointed in this generation that they jumped from the sinking ship already? The Series is selling less than the Switch, in NA, on Switch 2's launch year. Those 30 million sales came from an era where people still gave a damn about Xbox, but now even Microsoft doesn't give a damn anymore.

I mean, I don't think it is the thread about that. However, there are still a large number of Xbox enthusiasts out there. If you want to say that 30M+ sales is not reflecting that because some are (still) disappointed, that's fine. But there is still a significant number.

We're long past the days where hardware defines a console. It's the games (and the market share to justify developing the games) that are the problem.

The last console that wasn't just off-the-shelf PC parts was the PS3 with its Cell processor...

Not to derail, but I think Wii U was also custom hardware.

Everything else since PS3 though, yeah, it's just more economical use standardized parts nowadays.

Not enough to allow it to be competitive in the industry though and that's what actually matters. 

True - I forgot the release date of the WiiU.  Going forward, though, I expect consoles to just be "whatever the cutting edge NVidia/AMD/ARM chip is" at the day of release.  Systems will be won and lost on game libraries.

So much nonsense... 
It is not about being competitive with Sony/Nintendo anymore for Microsoft (and clearly, my comment is not about that), it is about being profitable, and if anything, you have no idea what the plan is for the next-gen hardware (other than believing very hard that they are not going to have any).

Even if it is 20m (which is probably much more), it is still a very large number of people to reach and this is assuming the next-gen hardware is not going to attract anyone (which again would be 100% random speculation)

I would be very surprised if the next Xbox (if it actually releases that is) hits or gets close to 20M. Gen to Gen going from 86M down to 58M down to ~35M. We're probably looking at between 10 to 15M at the very most for this thing. Hell, Sega pulled the Dreamcast off the shelf when it was between 9-10M so it's entirely possible that this thing has a short lifespan on any shelf. No matter how much the most diehard enthusiasts don't want to believe it, Xbox is over from a mainstream hardware perspective.

Sega was bleeding lots of money at the time (mainly due to the arcade market, Sega's main cash cow, crashing into oblivion) and couldn't afford selling the Dreamcast anymore as it was sold at a loss. Sega would have needed to raise the price per console by over $100 to break even, which would have killed the console either way, so they simply pulled the plug while they still could.

Also, dropping sales each gen don't have to mean anything. Just look at NES > SNES > N64 > GameCube - but then came the Wii and beat them all. But I agree that the outlook ain't very good to say the least.

That's what I'm talking about, MS may have had 35 million "enthusiasts" when the gen started, but it's a guarantee tha they have far less now.