Microsoft has no intention of starting to publicly disclose console sales numbers again, even if Xbox Series X/S greatly outperforms PlayStation 5.
“I can promise you that I won’t do that,”XboxbossPhil SpencertoldThe Guardian. Instead,Microsoftwill continue to use monthly active users as its key metric for success.
“I know it seems manipulative and I’ll apologise for that, but I don’t want my team’s focus on [console sales],” Spencer said. “The primary outcome of all the work that we do is how many players we see, and how often they play. That is what drives Xbox.
“If I start to highlight something else, both publicly and internally, it changes our focus. Things that lack backwards compatibility become less interesting. Putting our games onPCbecomes a reason that somebody doesn’t have to go and buy an Xbox Series X.
“I’ll hold fast to this. We publicly disclose player numbers. That’s the thing I want us to be driven by, not how many individual pieces of plastic did we sell.”
Earlier this year Spencer said Microsoft nowviews Amazon and Google as its primary competitorsin the games business, rather than its traditional rivalsNintendoandPlayStation, which he said aren’t set up to compete in the race to take gaming truly mainstream via the cloud.
“I think the people who want to pit us againstSonybased on who sold the most consoles lose the context of what gaming is about today,” he told The Guardian. “There are three billion people who play games on the planet today, but maybe [only] 200 million households that have a video game console. In a way, the console space is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the overall gaming pie.”
Microsoft launchedXbox Series X/Son November 10 whilePlayStation 5debuts on November 12. In terms of which new console ships more units this holiday season, Spencer believesthe victor will be determined by production capacityas demand for the machines is far outstripping supply.
