Xbox chief Phil Spencer has made the startling revelation that Microsoft had originally aimed to shift a huge 200 million units of the Xbox One. This would have been significantly higher than the 150 million sales of the best-selling games console to date, Sony’s PlayStation 2.
In an interview with Stevivor, Spencer explained that, due to the rising popularity of over-the-top video services like Netflix and Stan, Microsoft felt that it could “really embrace not only people playing video games, but also people with the changing habits in television” – and, in doing so, “really take the console market and the gaming market and … expand it potentially.”
And so, with this ambition in mind, Microsoft launched the Xbox One in 2013. However, the console seriously struggled in sales against Sony’s PlayStation 4, which was launched in the same year and ultimately ran away with the games console market. Spencer later took over the Xbox division from previous head Don Mattrick and returned the focus more strongly onto games.
Spencer reasoned: “You don’t earn the right to be relevant in other categories of usage for the console until you’ve earned the gaming right, so let’s go make sure that’s what we deliver”.
