Sales figures from Take-Two have unintentionally revealed the divide between the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and it isn’t looking good for Microsoft.
While it’s clear Sony’s PlayStation 5 has far surpassed sales of the Xbox Series X/S, the lack of concrete numbers from Microsoft makes it impossible to know exactly how much it’s sold.
Microsoft stopped publicly reporting Xbox sales in 2015, not-so coincidentally around the same time when Xbox One sales began to trail behind the PlayStation 4. Since then, the company has instead touted figures around Xbox Game Pass subscribers – although less regularly than it once did, as those numbers have failed to move as fast as they hoped.
We’ve had indications of the low sales of the Xbox Series X/S many times before, but thanks to Rockstar Games owner Take-Two we now have a more exact figure.
According to Take-Two’s Q3 2025 earnings report, over 94 million consoles from the current generation (which doesn’t include the Nintendo Switch) are estimated to have been sold, as of November 2024.
While there’s no definitive console split in the report, Sony previously announced it had shipped 65.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles as of September 30, 2024. Based on this figure, that means the Xbox Series X/S must have sold around 28.5 million worldwide, which lines up with prior estimates.
Both figures will have increased by this point, although Microsoft itself has made it clear that Xbox console sales over Christmas were not good.
Based on the figures above, that means Sony’s PlayStation 5 has roughly 70% of the overall current generation sales, compared to 30% for the Xbox Series X/S.
For Microsoft, this ratio is even worse than the previous generation. The Xbox One sold 58 million units against 117 million units for Sony’s PlayStation 4, so it had roughly 50% of sales, if you exclude the Nintendo Switch.
It’s also a sharp decline from Microsoft’s presence in the console market during the Xbox 360 generation, when it sold 84 million units worldwide, compared to the PlayStation 3’s 87.4 million.
The Xbox Series X/S isn’t the worst-selling Xbox console though, with the original Xbox selling only 24 million units. The first console was quickly abandoned in order to launch the Xbox 360 early and there’s some suggestion that Microsoft may be planning a similar approach for the Xbox Series X/S’s successor.
Despite Microsoft’s failure with the Xbox Series X/S, the company is developing a next generation console and possibly a separate handheld system. It remains to be seen though what Microsoft can offer, beyond hyperbolic promises of the ‘largest technical leap ever’, to entice people away from Sony’s stable.
The role of Microsoft’s next console is even murkier considering the company has shifted its priorities into becoming a multiplatform publisher, with many Xbox games now coming out on PlayStation 5 and eventually Nintendo Switch 2.
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