By now it is quite obvious that Xbox One sales didn't go according to Microsoft's prelaunch expectations. For nearly three years, the console has been consistently outsold 2-to-1 by PlayStation 4. In May Sony announced that it has sold its 40 millionth PlayStation 4 while Microsoft stopped releasing Xbox One sales figures last year. Third party market analysts currently estimate PS4 and Xbox One sales to be around 44 million and 22 million units respectively.
Microsoft originally had grander plans for the Xbox One. PS4's 40 million sales figure is dwarfed by Microsoft's plans for the Xbox One to sell 200 million units. "The goal that the team had was to figure out how could we sell 200 million game consoles,"Microsoft's Phil Spencer told Stevivor.com. "We've never seen a console sell that many units. The biggest individual console, the PS2, did 120 million or something like that."
When Sony finally ended PlayStation 2 production, the console has had sold nearly 150 million units. But Microsoft was confident the Xbox One was much more than a gaming console. "The approach the team took was people are moving to OTT [over-the-top] video services and television’s getting disrupted--and if we could build a console that could be at the center of this transition and really embrace not only people playing video games, but also people with the changing habits in television, you really take the console market and the gaming market and you expand it potentially."
Needless to say, things didn't go as planned. Trying to market Xbox One as a media center actually drove hardcore gamers towards the gaming-focused PlayStation 4 and nobody really cared about the console's media playback features in the era of Apple TV and cheap Android TV sticks.
Before the end of Xbox One's first year in market, Don Mattrick departed Microsoft, Phil Spencer took over the Xbox team and re-focused it on gaming.
"When we came in two-and-a-half years ago and started running the Xbox program, I centered us back on not trying to become something other than a game console," said Spencer. "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."
