With Xbox gearing up to announce… something around the future of its business this week, all eyes are on hardware and – at least according to a recent earnings report from Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive – its position in the “race” against the competitors is currently a very assured third.
A slide in the report gives us a look at the state of the industry, as far as Take-Two’s data tells it, and among some big numbers such as more than 3 billion active video game players globally and a market worth an eye-watering $222 billion USD, it also records that 77 million “Gen 9” consoles have been sold as at December 31st last year.
That number covers both PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and while Xbox doesn’t typically announce its hardware sales figures, we know that the PS5 has moved over 50 million units in that time, meaning we could comfortably suggest that Microsoft has sold somewhere shy of 27 million Xbox Series X|S consoles – almost a 2:1 difference in Sony’s favour.
Hot off the back of still-growing rumours that Xbox is planning to bring some of its catalogue of exclusive games to competing platforms, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has revealed that a “business update event” is scheduled for this week where the company will be sharing details on what’s next in the brand’s future.
We don’t yet have a date or time for when this “event” is going to occur, with Spencer’s message on social media last week simply reading, “We’re listening and we hear you. We’ve been planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox. Stay tuned.”
Naturally, many have assumed that this is in direct reaction to the claims that titles like Starfield, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, HiFi Rush and many more will be going multiplatform at some stage in the future, so it’ll be interesting to see if/how this affects Microsoft’s hardware plans going forward (if any of it is true).
