Microsoft stops reporting console sales
Company shifts focus to Xbox Live engagement metrics
Apples-to-apples comparisons in the console wars are getting even harder to come by. As reported by Game Informer, Microsoft has changed the way it reports the performance of its Xbox gaming business.
Going forward, Microsoft will no longer give quarterly sales updates for its Xbox One hardware. Instead, it will give metrics related to its Xbox Live gaming service. According to the report, the company is focusing more on engagement than console sales as a measuring stick.
In reporting its earnings yesterday, Microsoft said Xbox Live monthly active users were up 28 percent year-over-year to 39 million. (The company did not indicate how many of those users paid for Xbox Live Gold instead of the free Xbox Live Silver membership.) It also said hardware revenues were down an unspecified amount, and blamed the decrease on falling sales of Xbox 360 consoles.
PlayStation 4 significantly outsold the Xbox One to start this console generation, and the gap between the two has been projected to increase significantly in the coming years.
2. Is it legal for a publicly traded corporation to hide information like this?
Obviously, MS themselves will have access to both internally, but do third-party pubs/devs have access to that info? It seems like it might be useful.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Morville O'Driscoll on 24th October 2015 10:46am
Even Sony's doing better in that at least they've got the Vita as well as the PS4 platform set up to let me chat with my friends, see what they're playing, and so on. Even without a PS4, my Vita still ties me in a least a little bit with my friends in that community.
Equally, people who own an Xbox but don't log on aren't terribly valuable to Microsoft in the long term (hmmm, might need further research about percentage of Xbox users who have *never* joined Xbox Live.)
But for the metrics to be really meaningful, just usage isn't enough. We need better conversion and ARPPU figures. I would like to think that MS beats most mobile and possibly even PC F2P businesses on those metrics. But maybe it doesn't. Time to dive into those financial reports.
I'm all for reporting engagement stats, but there's nothing in MS's presentation that says anything about the engagement of their Xbox Live users, just that they're "active" in some undefined sense of the term.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Curt Sampson on 27th October 2015 3:45pm