Of late, Microsoft refuses to give sales figures for the Xbox One family of consoles, preferring to focus on metrics that are a bit more nebulous like engagement - time spent by users within the Xbox ecosystem, be it on the Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X or Windows 10 PC via Xbox Live. And while the company still doesn’t share sales data on the Xbox One line up, it did confirm that Xbox One sales are up 15 percent year on year. A heartening sign when you consider that Xbox One exclusives have been few and far between.
“Today, we’re witnessing a record-setting number of players, playing at record levels, and engaging in new ways. Xbox Live players are up 13 percent and Xbox One sales are up 15 percent over the same period last year, but that’s not all. We’ve seen more than 600,000 friendships forged with the Looking For Group feature and there are now more than 1.2 million Clubs on Xbox Live,” wrote Mike Nichols, CMO for Gaming at Microsoft in a post on the official Xbox website entitled ‘A Record-Setting Road to E3’.
And while a lot of the post talks up the Xbox division’s favourite word - engagement, there are some interesting stats to glean such as players spending over four billion hours on games released through its ID@Xbox program and nearly a billion hours on games launched via the Xbox One backwards compatibility program.
Although all of this seems rather self-congratulatory we wonder what E3 2018 will bring for Xbox One fans. The company has excelled at showing off big, grandiose announcements like the Xbox One X and Xbox One backwards compatibility, but there’s been little in way of exclusive content. Hopefully this changes at E3 2018.
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