Yesterday Microsoft announced a pretty steep year over year drop in console sales for their Xbox brand in the quarterly financial report.  While up to this point, we’ve gotten a pretty clear picture from NPD data and Microsoft’s balance sheet as to how many Xbox One consoles they’ve sold thus far, it appears that things may be a bit murky going forward as the company will no longer give quarterly sales figures for the console.
Apparently Microsoft is changing the way are reporting their Xbox gaming business figures, and these will be focused on Xbox Live subscribers instead of console sales. Â According to a recent report, Microsoft is planning to focus attention on engagement with Xbox Live as its primary measuring stick.
While yesterday’s report did reveal a 17% decrease in Xbox hardware sales year over year, Microsoft attributed this to a big drop in sales for their Xbox 360.  The bright spot in the report for Microsoft was in the number of Xbox Live users growing and software revenue increasing.  It’s still unclear how many of these new Xbox Live users are paying customers and how many are Silver members who can use the service for free.
North American numbers were recently released for September’s NPD, which saw Sony once again leading the pack with the PlayStation 4. Â It will be interesting to see how Microsoft’s holiday 2015 works out for them, they have a number of high profile releases on the way including one of the biggest games of the year on any platform with Halo 5: Guardians on October 27th.
