Xbox One Sales Dip in Early 2015

After an aggressive holiday season, seeing price cuts for both Xbox One (XB1) and PlayStation 4 (PS4), figures now reveal that Microsoft has taken a hit in the first quarter of 2015. Shipments were down 20% year on year with just 1.6 million shipped worldwide.

This wouldn’t be such a bad thing in the grand scheme, but Sony announced in early March that it had already sold 1.7 million units worldwide in just the first two months of the year, with more likely stashed in retailers warehouses. Using a bit of simple math, that could possibly equate to a quarterly sales figure of over 3 million units for Sony; easily dwarfing Microsoft’s figures.

Along with the poor shipment levels, the aggressive pricing strategy has come around and bitten them hard. Revenue from Xbox platforms as a whole was down 24% year on year. This has been pinned on the fact that the XB1 has dropped 33% of its price tag from January 2014 to January 2015; meaning it would have to sell 33% more products to just match last years sales.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, Microsoft announced Xbox Live usage was up over 30%, suggesting those that own the system are spending more time and money on the system.

Console companies generally sell their products at a loss to pick up a larger player base and then make the money back on games and DLC, but reports have come in that publishers outside of Microsoft are selling fewer Xbox games than they were a year ago; adding up to the nine-month fiscal year revenues are down 7%.

Do you own a console? How would you feel if it became a ‘one horse race’? Let us know in the comments

Thank you to ArsTechnica for providing us with this information