Xbox Series X/S console sales fall further behind PS5 in latest sales figures

Sales of the Xbox Series X/S continue to plummet in the US, as console sales as a whole reach their lowest point since the launch of the current gen.

There’s a lot of confusion and uncertainty in the games industry at the moment, regarding the future plans of both Microsoft and Sony. Both have been acting strangely for years now, although with Microsoft it’s easier to understand why, given the constantly declining sales of the Xbox Series X and S consoles.

If there’s one single reason for Microsoft’s push towards multiformat releases it’s the collapse in sales for the Xbox Series X/S over Christmas 2023 in the US, only months after they completed the purchase of Activision Blizzard.

That made it clear that not only was the current generation of hardware not selling but that it didn’t make economic sense to keep any Activision Blizzard (or Bethesda) titles as console exclusives. Sales of the Xbox Series X/S have continued to decline ever since and the latest figures show they’re now 19% behind the Xbox One at the same point in its life.

The problem here is that not only is the US the biggest market for Xbox but that the the Xbox One already sold poorly, with only around 58 million consoles in its lifetime – compared to over 113.5 million for would-be rival the PlayStation 4.

There is no exact figure for Xbox One or Xbox Series X/S sales, because Microsoft stopped reporting them, but it’s estimated the Xbox Series X/S is currently on only around 32 million, compared to 75 million for the PlayStation 5.

Although Microsoft continues to insist that they have not abandoned the hardware market, with recent rumours seemingly revealing more about their new handheld device and their next gen console, they do certainly seem to have given up on the Xbox Series X/S.

After each platform’s first 52 months in market, PlayStation 5 unit sales exceed PlayStation 4’s sales pace by 7%, while Xbox Series now trails Xbox One by 19%.

This was most obvious in the lack of marketing and hardware bundles for the consoles over Christmas. There’s also been repeated talk of low stock, and Microsoft abandoning some smaller markets, although they’ve always denied it when specific examples have come up.

The 19% figure comes from Mat Piscatella, director of US chart tracker Circana. In the same set of figures, he revealed that PlayStation 5 sales are currently beating the PlayStation 4 by 7%.

These figures are only for the US, but it is by far the biggest territory for Xbox, in terms of volume and percentage of the market. The UK is the only other major market where Xbox sales come anywhere close to the PlayStation 5, and while there’s less public sales data it is also seeing similar declines to the US.

Piscatella’s thread on Bluesky also reveals that video game spending so far this year, in the US, is down 11% overall compared to 2024, with mobile, consoles, and PC all down but subscriptions up 9% – although that’s calculated by revenue and is likely only a reflection of recent price increases.

Hardware sales as a whole, and especially given that the Nintendo Switch is about to be replaced by its successor, were down 25% compared to February 2024, making for the lowest February since 2020 – the last one before the launch of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

In the US software charts, Monster Hunter Wilds instantly became the best-selling game of 2025, with Steam accounting for more than half of all revenues.

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