This is precisely it. I'm not sure how accurate his claim is that Xbox Series X is unavailable in North America: I've checked online store of my (previous) European country, and I've noticed that the typical big online retailers are currently sold out of Xbox Series X.
The thing with the Xbox Series X is that it's probably not impossible to find one, and they're not sold out everywhere, but they are still not readily available at every location where they should be. The Series S probably has a lot to do with it: A not insignificant amount of them are clearly sitting on store shelves while MS can't produce enough of the system that people actually want. I've noticed that the conversation about the Series S has changed online as well: It's no longer labeled as the "Little stroke of Genius" and is now more accurately described as the poor investment that it really is.
I've heard that it's basically 3 Series S for every 1 Series X produced. In other words, 75% of global stock would (theoretically) be Series Ss.
Considering the lack of demand for that model specifically in the majority of markets, Microsoft might have made a disastrous miscalculation.
Microsoft hasn't bothered to market the thing for months, it's all about Series S and all that talk about power has farted into the wind too.
He has a substantial following , he gets his freebies, I just can't respect the guy. He's everything I didn't want the Xbox fan base to be.
And unfortunately, Xbox corporate freely associate with people like him, even play games with them online.
It's just way too much blurring of the line for me, personally. Where does the genuine fan enthusiast end and the shilling begin?
To be honest FH5 must be at around 25 million player count already, and Starfield is absolutely going to crush these numbers.
About the players on PC vs console, i'd say the opposite, i can't see less than 70% of it's sales being on PC. It's the biggest gaming platform outside of phones, plus Starfield is a RPG which is a PC centric genre, so i'd expect very big numbers there.
This said, i agree it won't be enough to save Xbox's 2023, it's going to take years and many games for Xbox to rise again, it will help sure, but nothing huge
Considering various other things MS have claimed in the past about performance metrics of Xbox & Game Pass have turned out to be lies or half-truths at best (going by the court documents), I would have some reservations over the player count numbers. We already know they are lifetime cumulative; you can go look up FH5 concurrent numbers right now and they usually hover around 5K or so on PC. Which is better than Halo's average, but not by much.
The audience for both are mainly on console, but probably nothing more than 10x on PC, so maybe 50K - 60K concurrent for them on Xbox side of things. Cumulatively that would still be lower than any of the biggest Steam games are doing concurrent, or the biggest MP games on PlayStation concurrent. Even other MP games on Xbox are doing bigger numbers, like COD and I'd imagine maybe Minecraft.
Starfield's PC sales will be interesting because I kind of agree with your percentage range; in the past games like Skyrim did most of their sales on console actually, but that was between Xbox, PS and Nintendo. Starfield isn't coming to PlayStation 5, and Game Pass's subscriber base is vast majority on Xbox consoles. We know most people on Xbox are going to play the game on Game Pass, so that's going to severely impact the Xbox sales numbers. PC, though, it's a different story because gamers there by large don't mess with PC Game Pass, so they'll more than likely buy it on Steam.
Last year, we didn't really have a solid enough picture to understand just how the business plans of Sony & MS were being met by the various markets; I never thought the ATVI sale was a panic buy move. But looking at it now, with 12 months of data in our hands, with supply issues largely in the rear view, its quite clear that ATVI is exactly what you described it as: a $69b panic button.
Yeah, same. Back in January 2022 I thought the ABK announcement was a 4D chess-level move, but cracks started showing almost immediately, in hindsight. Going out of their way to signal COD would remain multiplat, talking with Sony right after the announcement...then seeing how the announcement wiped away $20 billion off Sony's market cap in a flash (I wonder if this has been brought up to regulators? Maybe they've kept it in mind).
At the time I wasn't really trying or wanting to see some of those things for what they were; then they do the Sega announcement and I thought that was going to be for some exclusive games similar to the OG Xbox days...nope. Not even. Really just a thing for Azure & Game Pass. Then the barrenness of Xbox's 2022 really started showing itself, then early console lifetime sales reports from analysts, then all the problems with various Xbox 1P games (Halo, Perfect Dark, Fable, Everwild etc.).
In truth I don't feel that when MS made the ABK announcement they did it as a "panic button" move; they probably saw it as them putting Sony into a checkmate situation. But here we are a little over a year later and, well, it's MS who have checkmated themselves. Talk about an absolute reversal of (mis)fortune, and all Sony had to do was stay the course and focus on what they've always focused on.
Oh, and I guess calling Microsoft's bluff over ABK & COD was also a thing.
Sony recovered because chip demand dropped. There weren't any on shelves for the first half of last year hence the huge percentages of uplift you are seeing now vs YoY.
Somethings going on with the series x now and I'm not sure what it is. I don't think any of us know as there seems to be less series x now than a year ago which doesn't make sense. Maybe they are going through an internal design change or chip size reduction that's affected production.
They need to get it sorted before starfield.
If it's true that MS manufacture 3 S chips for ever 1 X chip, and that they share a single wafer pipeline, I don't think there's a lot Microsoft can do to change the situation. Because if they want to increase Series X chips, they're going to be
SIGNIFICANTLY increasing Series S chip production amounts, too. They can't just elect to only increase volume of production for one portion of the wafer.
It's either that or they get a 2nd wafer just for Series X chips, but now they're paying for two chips. The wafer part of their production, TBH it's not something I thought much about before but talking with someone else kind of cued me to consider it more deeply. MS's "problem" is that they probably can't justify increasing Series X volume without also dramatically increasing Series S production, since they both use the same wafer line.
If that 3:1 rule holds true then we also have a global sales split for S to X units; at least, up to January this year, if MS were at say 17.62 million, then 4.405 million of those would have been Series X units. The other 13.215 million would have been Series S systems. So I guess folks saying the sales situation would be absolutely dire if MS only had the Series X, are right. Maybe on that same wafer they'd of been able to have 3 Series X chips if they didn't have a Series S? But then that'd of put them at 13.215, it'd be something like 2.42:1 in favor PS5 in that scenario.
That's assuming MS would have stayed with the same volume of production. I'm wondering if Sony simply have more wafer lines than Microsoft; it would make sense considering expected demand and combine that with PS5's chip being smaller than Series X's; Sony probably spend more on chip wafer production but it's Microsoft losing a lot of money on hardware because the chip they're manufacturing at a 3x rate (Series S) just isn't selling well at all.
