Microsoft won't disclose Xbox Series sales numbers even if they're successful

Microsoft will not be dislosing any Xbox Series sales numbers throughout the next generation, even if they outsell their competitors.  

In an interview with The Guardian, Xbox boss Phil Spencer revealed that no Xbox Series sales numbers will be disclosed. Instead, the company will focus on the engagement numbers of their playerbase.

“I don’t want my team’s focus on [console sales],” the Xbox boss told the outlet. “The primary outcome of all the work that we do is how many players we see, and how often they play. That is what drives Xbox. If I start to highlight something else, both publicly and internally, it changes our focus.”

“Things that lack backwards compatibility become less interesting. Putting our games on PC becomes a reason that somebody doesn’t have to go and buy an Xbox Series X. I’ll hold fast to this. We publicly disclose player numbers. That’s the thing I want us to be driven by, not how many individual pieces of plastic did we sell.”

When asked if the company will disclose Xbox Series sales numbers if they sell more consoles that Sony with the PlayStation 5, Spencer said: “I can promise you that I won’t do that.”

Spencer explained that the success of the Xbox ecosystem is more similar to that of Google’s Stadia platform,  likening the sales of Xbox Series consoles to the Chromecast that Stadia pushes for peak Stadia compatibility.

“In the last year we’ve had Google and Amazon and now Facebook announcing they’re coming into our gaming space,” Spencer explained.  “I’m not gonna go compete with their numbers based on how many Xbox Series X I’ve sold. [Google] is never gonna talk about how many Chromecast Pros they sold. They’re gonna talk about how many players they have.”

“There are 3 billion people who play games on the planet today, but maybe [only] 200 million households that have a video game console. In a way, the console space is becoming a smaller and smaller percentage of the overall gaming pie.”