Some publishers reportedly questioning support for Xbox amid ‘flatlining’ sales

Some third-party publishers are reportedly expressing doubts about continuing to support Xbox consoles amid “flatlining” sales in Europe.

That’s according to GamesIndustry.biz head Chris Dring, who said his takeaway from GDC last week was that he thinks “Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer”.

“The other thing I heard—I heard it from a very prominent company and one not so prominent—was Xbox’s performance in Europe is just flatlining”, he said.

“You can follow our monthly coverage in the games market and you can see that Xbox sales are falling, and it’s been falling all throughout last year and it’s falling even harder this year.

“The phrase one major company who released a big game last year said [was], ‘I don’t know why we bothered supporting it’.

“We mentioned on a previous podcast that we’d heard retailers in Europe are considering or had already been cutting back their Xbox stock on their shelves—hardware, games, that kind of thing—and now you’ve got third-party publishers going, ‘we’re putting in a lot of effort trying to create a Series S version and an X version of a game when, to be honest with you, for us the market is PC and PS5’.”

Last year, Microsoft admitted to having “lost the console wars” after consistently ranking third behind PlayStation and Nintendo in terms of sales since entering the market with the original Xbox in 2001.

PS5 had outsold Xbox Series X/S by around 2-to-1 globally as of the end of 2023, according to data shared by Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two.

And in February, Microsoft delivered an Xbox business update which confirmed reports that it’s planning to bring more first-party games to PlayStation and/or Switch, in the form of Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves and Grounded.

Xbox has also reportedly weighed up the idea of releasing Gears of War, Microsoft Flight Simulator, the next Doom game, Starfield and Indiana Jones for rival consoles, and boss Phil Spencer recently told The Verge: “I don’t think we should as an industry ever rule out a game going to any other platform.”

Further reading

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Former Xbox boss believes ‘serious questions’ are being asked about future of consoles

“I think it's a real serious question that's being asked I'm sure in Tokyo, in Redmond"

Dring continued: “And with Xbox putting some of the games on PS5—from what I understand the majority of them will be coming across at some point, assuming it progresses as Xbox believes it probably will—I think Xbox is in real trouble as a hardware manufacturer, and that was the thing that came out of GDC for me.”

He added: “I thought it would be fine, but then I didn’t really factor in that some developers and publishers might just go, ‘yeah I don’t, you know, is there any point?’ And that is when you can lose it.”