Surmising that continually reporting on how Sony’s PlayStation 4 was eating the Xbox One’s lunch, Microsoft stopped publicly releasing hardware sales figures in October, choosing instead to focus on “engagement” numbers related to Xbox Live. Thanks to Electronic Arts, however, we now have a pretty good idea how many Xbox Ones are currently in the wild.

Listening in on an EA financial call last night, Eurogamer overheard the publisher’s CFO, Blake Jorgensen, state that he believes there to be 55 million PS4s and Xbox Ones in consumers’ homes. Doing some quick math, that puts global Xbox One lifetime sales somewhere around 19 million units or less.

“Our estimate is 55 million units out there, which has exceeded virtually everyone’s forecast for the year and [is] now almost 50 percent higher than [the] previous console cycle, so all of that is very, very positive,” Jorgensen is reported to have said on the call.

Since the market-leading Sony has been more than happy to continue making PlayStation 4 sales numbers public, we know that 35.9 million PS4s had been sold globally as of January 5. It’s not clear if Jorgensen’s 55 million figure was based on data from the 5th or more recent information, so it’s possible that he counted even more than 35.9 million PS4s as part of the 55 million total console sales he estimated.

Xbox One PS4 Sales

We also know that the Wii U has moved well more than 10 million units, and the Xbox One had sold somewhere around 16 million lifetime units through last October, so it’s reasonable to assume that Wii U sales are not a part of Jorgensen’s 55 million. That means the 55 million number consists of at least 35.9 million PS4s and no more than 19.1 million Xbox Ones.

The timing of EA’s console sales revelation happened to coincide with Microsoft’s financial report for the quarter ending December 31, 2015. Xbox One revenue experienced a “slight” decrease during this quarter, but Microsoft still says it moved more Xbox One units year-over-year and attributed the lost revenue to lower hardware sales prices. The Xbox One may be trailing the PS4 by a significant margin, but Microsoft’s current console is still outpacing its last at this same point during the Xbox 360’s life cycle.

Source: Eurogamer

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