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[ReasonBeing]

But the million dollar questions are probably: How many are s+x series owners - to remove the redundant install base number? And then how many prefer to play on a series console - whether or not it is their only option or in a household with one of PS5/Pro/PC?

Question 1 could easily lower that number to 20m IMO, and question 2 could possibly lower it to 7-8m. If that were the case you'd need to hope at least 50% of those weren't gamepass rental hold outs and regular players that main Xbox and prefer to buy their games, so a successful game had a chance to sell to half of that number and land 2-4m actual sales for a great game

edit: not because games need to sell 2-4m on xbox, but if a COD or GTA couldn't then that might send warning signals for a lesser game's possible ROI.

So its reasonable to assume 1/3 of all Series owners own both a Series X and a Series S, and then nearly 2/3 of those also own a PS5/Pro/capable gaming PC that they prefer to play games on? That's a lot of assumptions to be made when trying to answer "the million dollar question".

 

[IntentionalPun]

Games are still selling ok there? Even a distant third place can be tens or hundreds of millions in revenue. Considering Xbox games are basically PC games with a few different settings prefixes it's well worth it for most companies.

Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.

Elden Ring for instance was reported to be doing 25-30% of its sales on Xbox. That's several million copies and probably a couple hundred million in revenue.

 

[intheinbetween]

Developing for consoles is closer to developing for PC than ever, so porting to PS or XBOX is not that expensive to get a decent ROI so, for medium and large studios and publishers XBOX will still be profitable. MS has built an ecosystem leveraging XBOX and Windows devices so there are millions of customers out there, and more to come.

Wether you like it or not XBOX ist going anywhere, it will probably change its business model but they won't be exiting the console gaming hardware industry, bear in mind Microsoft still sells their own Surface devices and they are not the top sellers when it comes to laptops, but they make money and have a good reputation when it comes to design and build quality for the enterprise and mid-range consumers

 

[PaintTinJr]

So its reasonable to assume 1/3 of all Series owners own both a Series X and a Series S, and then nearly 2/3 of those also own a PS5/Pro/capable gaming PC that they prefer to play games on? That's a lot of assumptions to be made when trying to answer "the million dollar question".

We know the series S has outsold the Series-X by 2 or 3 to 1, and we had lots of people talking about picking up more than one Series S for their bedrooms, game rooms etc here for at least 12months. The series S is demographically different from the whole market as a little brother with no disc drive. The core Xbox userbase are also core gamers that do buy everything going by Gaf. They also bought the X, and a lot bought some series-s. My numbers might be wildly wrong, but it isn't wrong to suggest in a 3 or 2 to 1 ratio that there is an upper cap on Series X owners, and that number will be core gamers and between 10-15m on the Xbox.

 

[hououinkyouma00]

let's not pretend like the competition is a utopia.

Calling Xbox "dead" isn't an argument, it's a lazy headline from people who confuse console wars with critical thinking.

The real question is: why wouldn't a dev want their game on as many platforms and revenue models as possible?

This. I do think the brand is dying but it's not dead yet. There are still like 25-30 million Series consoles out there.

Now whether or not it will be worth releasing on Xbox during the coming generation is a different story.

We know the series S has outsold the Series-X by 2 or 3 to 1, and we had lots of people talking about picking up more than one Series S for their bedrooms, game rooms etc here for at least 12months. The series S is demographically different from the whole market as a little brother with no disc drive. The core Xbox userbase are also core gamers that do buy everything going by Gaf. They also bought the X, and a lot bought some series-s. My numbers might be wildly wrong, but it isn't wrong to suggest in a 3 or 2 to 1 ratio that there is an upper cap on Series X owners, and that number will be core gamers and between 10-15m on the Xbox.

Bolded the important part.

Enthusiast forums are NOT indicative of the real world. People buying multiples of the same console is very rare. I don't see 1/3 (so 7.5-10 million) people buying a second Xbox console especially this generation. People gotta get off the internet for awhile.

 

[delirium trigger]

Idk, maybe to SELL VIDEOGAMES.

This forum is so stupid when it comes to xbox. I like playstation more, too, but there are millions of people playing xbox.

 

[PaintTinJr]

This. I do think the brand is dying but it's not dead yet. There are still like 25-30 million Series consoles out there.

Now whether or not it will be worth releasing on Xbox during the coming generation is a different story.


Bolded the important part.

Enthusiast forums are NOT indicative of the real world. People buying multiples of the same console is very rare. I don't see 1/3 (so 7.5-10 million) people buying a second Xbox console especially this generation. People gotta get off the internet for awhile.

The Series S has virtually no storage and no disc drive positioning it far more as a second Xbox system when you consider the number of Game Pass users too that have been sold on the idea of renting games too. I suspect if most series X owners didn't have a Series S then the X would have massively outsold the Series S.

I appreciate that Gaf in gaming typically isn't the world, but the dying part of xbox - similar to Sega - is that their relevance gets reduced closer and closer to their core enthusiast market (IMO) which Gaf perfectly represents and most Xbox main players on Gaf will be rocking the superior Series X as their primary Xbox, no?

 

[Verchod]

I don't think a console is Microsofts platform, it's gamepass. Developers make a game for PC/gamepass, and then maybe they'll have a compatibility mode to aim form, like Steam has with the Steam deck.

 

[hououinkyouma00]

The Series S has virtually no storage and no disc drive positioning it far more as a second Xbox system when you consider the number of Game Pass users too that have been sold on the idea of renting games too. I suspect if most series X owners didn't have a Series S then the X would have massively outsold the Series S.

I appreciate that Gaf in gaming typically isn't the world, but the dying part of xbox - similar to Sega - is that their relevance gets reduced closer and closer to their core enthusiast market (IMO) which Gaf perfectly represents and most Xbox main players on Gaf will be rocking the superior Series X as their primary Xbox, no?

Sure, but it's also possible that that core audience is only ~7-10M strong, and that a lot of Series S were sold as secondary consoles not as a companion to a Series X but a PS5 or PC because it's cheap. Being cheap is actually a good selling point which is the whole point of it existing in general.

Ultimately this information will never be known because while I'm sure Microsoft has some sort of numbers pertaining to this they have no reason to ever do anything with it.

Everybody that I know personally (obviously a small sample size) that has a Series S bought it because it was cheap and a way to play Game Pass games alongside their PS5 or bought it for their children. Now there was a time when I owned both a X and S but it was only because I got the S for $150 from Verizon.

Also a lot of "casual gamers" don't keep a million games installed on their console. Think of all the people out there that only play COD, FIFA, Madden, or Fortnite. They don't need a disc drive and they don't need storage (insert joke about COD storage here).

 

[ReasonBeing]

We know the series S has outsold the Series-X by 2 or 3 to 1, and we had lots of people talking about picking up more than one Series S for their bedrooms, game rooms etc here for at least 12months. The series S is demographically different from the whole market as a little brother with no disc drive. The core Xbox userbase are also core gamers that do buy everything going by Gaf. They also bought the X, and a lot bought some series-s. My numbers might be wildly wrong, but it isn't wrong to suggest in a 3 or 2 to 1 ratio that there is an upper cap on Series X owners, and that number will be core gamers and between 10-15m on the Xbox.

"going by Gaf" I don't think using anecdotal stories from enthusiast communities is going to give us a clear picture of what the total market looks like. I'm not saying that the information is useless, but one would have to be careful using it to derive any meaningful conclusions about the the market as a whole.

Regarding your final statement, let us assume that the 2 to 1 ratio is still accurate in 2025; all that tells us is there are around 20 million Series S in the wild and 10 million Series X in the wild. Of course there is some ownership overlap, but it WOULD be wrong to use this info to state there are 10-15 million core gamers on the Xbox platform. That's using assumptions to extrapolate. What it seems like your doing is defining a "core gamer" as someone who owns a Series X, that doesn't adhere to the accepted definition of the term. Now this in itself doesn't make you wrong, but cherry picking numbers to present an arbitrary pool of Xbox users that devs can potentially sell their software to definitely doesn't make you right.

I think my overall point would better be served by me saying that we know the general spread of Series consoles in the hands of gamers, but we don't have the specific information necessary to derive the particular stratification of these gamers and their purchasing habits.

 

[TheMule1983]

It's not really 30 million potential customers though. That's a really Myopic way of looking at things.

Regions matter, genre matters. It's why you'll see a lot of Japanese games outright skip the Xbox Series, because they know the primary sales will be in Japan. Same reason why a lot of RPGs skip the XBS. Simply not enough RPG fans in the userbase. Microsoft paid money to get Persona and Metaphor on Xbox, but we still haven't seen Final Fantasy, despite Square Enix desperately needing more sales. Even Switch 2 is getting FF7 remake before Xbox Series...

That 30 million number is far more useful in the west and in North America in particular, especially to western developers who are targeting that region with their games.

It's also the ease in supporting it. The same reason the Steam Deck gets support despite not having a large userbase.

Those are JRPGs. Plenty of real RPGs do on Xbox.

 

[Woopah]

They have been actively trained for years not to buy games. Do some still do? Of course, but probably not nearly enough when even Microsoft decided to go third party with their own games. I've been reading way too many "no gamepass no buy" comments all these years. The training worked, except it backfired in the end.

There's still games that sell over a million copies on Xbox, which might be enough to offset porting costs.

As long as companies still bring titles to Xbox (without gamepass), we know there's money to be made from the ecosystem.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Sure, but it's also possible that that core audience is only ~7-10M strong, and that a lot of Series S were sold as secondary consoles not as a companion to a Series X but a PS5 or PC because it's cheap. Being cheap is actually a good selling point which is the whole point of it existing in general.

Ultimately this information will never be known because while I'm sure Microsoft has some sort of numbers pertaining to this they have no reason to ever do anything with it.

Everybody that I know personally (obviously a small sample size) that has a Series S bought it because it was cheap and a way to play Game Pass games alongside their PS5 or bought it for their children. Now there was a time when I owned both a X and S but it was only because I got the S for $150 from Verizon.

Also a lot of "casual gamers" don't keep a million games installed on their console. Think of all the people out there that only play COD, FIFA, Madden, or Fortnite. They don't need a disc drive and they don't need storage (insert joke about COD storage here).

Which is all fine, but that then says to 3rd party developers their games won't sell to anyone but the 7-10m audience because a cheap series S for Game Pass with inadequate storage is competing with PlayStation 5 or PC, which is no contest and still comes back to hoping the 7-10m aren't Game Pass hold outs too, don't have a PS5 or PC they buy games on in preference, and actually want their game.

Surely that's just another different but viable route to the same type of numbers I discussed originally and the 'how' - 'the sales happen' - is less relevant to the thread topic, no?

 

[TheSHEEEP]

The fact that it's easy to port from PC & PS5 makes it a why not situation .

Exactly this.

You don't develop engines from scratch anymore (well, most don't).
If your game runs on platform X, it will run on platform Y and Z as well and you won't have to do much to make it so - apart from bleeding edge stuff you might have to optimize per-platform.

Millions of people have an XBox, so "why not" is honestly the best answer.
It doesn't matter that other platforms are bigger if a given platform is "big enough" to make money on.