Xbox One sold around 50 million consoles – half that of PS4 – reveals legal document

metro.co.uk:

Microsoft might not want to release Xbox sales figures publicly, but they’ve been forced to by their attempt to buy Activision Blizzard.

The previous generation was not a good one for Microsoft. TheXbox One was a flop before it was ever released, with the reveal event proving a disaster when all Microsoft would talk about is the console being always online and how they seemed to be more interested in TV than games.

They never recovered and with Sony making a concerted effort to learn from the failures of the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4 went on to sell 117.2 million consoles.

Microsoft refused to release public sales figures for the Xbox One, but it was assumed to have sold around 50 million – and now that’s been officially confirmed.

We only know this because of Microsoft’s ongoing attempt to prove to various monopoly commissions around the world, that them buying Activision Blizzard wouldn’t change the entire face of the games industry and that actually Call Of Duty isn’t that big of a deal anyway.

A lot of this information has come from the Brazilian investigation and that’s also where this new revelation originates from (in Portuguese and via Google Translate), where it’s stated that the PlayStation 4 sold ‘twice as many’ consoles as the Xbox One.

Clearly that’s only meant as a rough estimate, so we’ll probably never know the exact amount, but if you take it at face value it translates to a figure of around 58.6 million.

Microsoft made the comment because they’re trying to downplay the threat they’d be to Sony and others if the acquisition went ahead. That’s why they’ve also been pretending Call Of Duty is less significant than it is and trying to paint themselves as the industry underdog.

They go so far as to use the