Console sales are stable in the United States. This is largely due to a decline in sales of Xbox consoles, despite the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Microsoft has still not found the recipe to sell its Xbox Series S and X en masse.
The manufacturer has however declined its console with new models, including an Xbox Series X without a disc reader. It also bought the giant Activision Blizzard to offer Call of Duty from day one in the Xbox Game Pass subscription.
These efforts seem not to be paying off, according to the console sales figures in the United States for the month of November, reported by analyst Mat Piscatella.
PlayStation climbs, Xbox declines
The analyst was able to work with the Circana firm to analyze the American video game market in November 2024.
On the games side, Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is a hit, just like the previous episode, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, which respectively occupy 2nd and 5th place in the sales ranking. Electronic Arts sports games fill the other spots in the Top 10, with the exception of Helldivers 2 at #3.
If we move away from PC and consoles, the biggest launch of this month of November is undoubtedly Pokémon TCG, the game released on smartphones at the end of October. It achieves the 2nd best turnover worldwide, and even beats the sector champion Monopoly Go!.
What interests us are also the sales of hardware : consoles and their accessories. In this segment of the market, we observe stagnation, due to growth in PlayStation (+15%) offset by a decline of 29% in spending in the Xbox ecosystem, and 3% for the Nintendo Switch.
For the latter, we are almost surprised by the good results, since we are talking about a live console, the next generation of which should soon be revealed.
For Xbox, on the other hand, the observation is a little more alarming. Microsoft really doesn’t seem to find the right recipe to sell its consoles. Despite a very attractive offer with the Game Pass and the takeover of numerous studios, the Xbox remains unloved on the market and is still left behind by its frontal competitor, the PlayStation 5.
Continuing its strategy for 10 years, Microsoft is trying to pivot to expand its ecosystem to cloud gaming, mobile and PC, which will increase game sales and revenues for the Xbox branch in the broad sense. As for the life of the home console specifically, the horizon does not seem bright.
