The US revenue numbers for Xbox are in, indicating a strong showing for Microsoft's gaming brand.
According to Eurogamer, the Green team managed to post record hardware sales numbers in March - their first in 11 years. The strong sales of both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S were the catalyst for this growth, as both consoles led the US market in terms of dollar sales.
The data came from the analytics firm NPD and was shared on Twitter by Matt Piscatella. According to him, Xbox's hardware unit and dollar sales for March 2022 have set new all-time highs for it for the month of March. These record numbers weren't seen since the Xbox 360 era (in terms of units sold) and the Xbox One era (in terms of dollar sales).
What this means is that both the Series X and Series S have brought in more money than the PlayStation 5. But despite this, the best-selling console when it comes to total units sold in the US is still the Nintendo Switch, writes The Verge. This is the same for both the month of March and the entirety of 2022 so far. All of this came when Americans spent less money on video games this year compared to last year. As per another tweet by Piscatella, video game spending in March 2022 dropped 15% cxompared to last year's high, which was tallied in December:
NPD blames this drop in spending for a simple reason: there weren't any consoles in stock at stores. Supply issues were indeed the biggest reason why so many people still don't have the current-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles - even if both systems have been out for around a year and a half now.
Xbox Creeping Into PlayStation's Territory
So far, Microsoft's current-gen consoles are proving to be great competitors to Sony's, even if the PS5 is still far more popular when it comes to word-of-mouth. Once again, the numbers don't lie.
Back in March, IGN reported that total sales for the Series X/S and PS5 in the United States are basically neck-and-neck. After 16 months of being in the market, the PS5 has sold 6.77 million units, while the Series X and Series S combined have sold 6.22 million units. The numbers came from VGChartz, who also said that the Xbox Series consoles had closed the sales gap during three of the past four months:
It wasn't revealed whether these sales were influenced by big things, like the continued resurgence of Game Pass. There were also no actual numbers shared for some reason. So, for now, people will have to take NPD and Matt Piscatella on their word that Xbox has so far proved strong enough to compete with PlayStation early during the current-gen console war.
This isn't even considering Microsoft's up-and-coming aces in their sleeve, specifically the exclusives Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI.
Story posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce
