5 ms·
> Notably absent are Xbox consoles; they don't have a market-share lead in consoles, although though with their recent acquisition, they might in a few years.
by nolok 3y ago
> Notably absent are Xbox consoles; they don't have a market-share lead in consoles, although though with their recent acquisition, they might in a few years.
It's important to understand that Xbox is almost a non entity in the rest of the world, it's irrelevant in Japan and distant third in Europe (beside UK where it's first/equal with playstation). Xbox 360 carved a bit of a share in the rest of europe but then Xbox One destroyed that in one fell swoop and it never recovered since.
- dijit 3y agoAs a person who has worked in the AAA video games industry for nearly a decade now: this is the truth; though actually a bit more dire than you make it. From what I recall XB1 had a really mild advantage in north America which looked striking because it was a mere 50% of PS4 in every other market. With PS5/XBX the gap is even wider in favour of the playstation. Notably PC players are around the same number as XB1 players, though are slightly overrepresented in Europe compared to other markets.
- qwytw 3y agoMS is(has?) merged Xbox with PC PC gaming. Counting Xbox separately might not make much sense anymore when they are no different to locked down budget gaming PCs which can only access the MS store.
- mcpackieh 3y agoThey really haven't been merged in a meaningful sense; the PC gaming market is predominantly focused around other stores than the MS store, particularly Steam, and Xbox can't/won't have anything to do with that.
- qwytw 3y agoTrue, I guess my point was that Xbox seems more like a subset of the PC market rather than a separate platform like PS5.
- nolok 3y agoIt's a very recent turn of event, and it's less a choice and more something that they had to do to keep making any sense though, since they don't get paid a license nor own the stores doing the selling it's disingenuous to describe it as "Xbox expanded to pc"
- qwytw 3y ago> "Xbox expanded to pc" But isn't Xbox app/store on PC exactly that?
- nolok 3y agoMy point is that nobody uses the Xbox store, if you're using that as a metric then they're really failing. Unless you consider the generic, installed by default "Xbox app" that's bundled with windows since 10 but again, nobody buys from that. And their strategy is still to keep them separate since Xbox Live is still different from Game Pass, and PC Game Pass is still different from Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft already "owns" PC Gaming by virtue of having windows, but they're not benefitting from it in a direct way through sales or licenses.
- qwytw 3y agoPC game pass supposedly has over 15 million subscribers which is quite a bit less than the 130 million active monthly steam users (then again I'm not sure you can directly compare these numbers) but not exactly "nobody".