Sony and Nintendo regularly publish sales data for their consoles. Microsoft used to do this, but stopped in 2015, and since then it has been selectively and cautiously boasting about Xbox sales. The company's financial director explained the reasons for this decision.
Tim Stewart argues that sales numbers are not an indicator of how Xbox is performing in the market.
“The initial reaction was, 'What are you doing, you're an Xbox company and you're not giving us sales data, that's pointless. That was actually the first time we said, 'No, content and services matter.'”
The CFO explains that for Microsoft, the number of customers and revenue from the Xbox brand is more important than the number of consoles sold. Xbox's mission is to bring the world of gaming to different users in different ways – not only by purchasing games in the classic way, but also through Game Pass and mobile games.
Tim Stewart also argues that many regions of the world live not on console games, but on streaming and mobile games – Africa, India and Southeast Asia are cited as examples.
Also important for Xbox is the market potential of users. The audience for consoles is “several hundred million gamers”, PC – about 400 million, and mobile games – “billions” of people.