Gaming industry executive Mark Stanley has revealed through his LinkedIn profile that, during his tenure with Microsoft between 2020 and 2023, which also coincided with the launch of the Xbox Series X/S consoles, the company was able to sell more than 12 million units in their first 18 months. This data is taking into account sales of Xbox Series X/S consoles across the over 40 countries where it was launched.
In his profile, Stanley also noted that part of his responsibilities was to navigate supply chain constraints that were quite widespread at the time, which would eventually lead to hardware shortages for both Sony and Microsoft in the following years.
Some of the other milestones noted by Stanley during the period include bringing Xbox to more markets across the APAC (Asia-Pacific), MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and LATAM (Latin America) regions, which revolved around Microsoft establishing local teams and distribution partnerships in these regions while also working within regulatory frameworks. He noted that this contributed over $1 billion in annual revenue from hardware sales and Game Pass.
Stanley was also part of a drive to grow international subscriptions for Game Pass. This drive included Xbox forming partnerships with local telecom providers, retailers and platform partners. This, he noted, contributed more than 25 million subscribers to the service from all over the world.
Microsoft, for its part, has been rather shy about revealing sales figures for Xbox Series X/S consoles, with its quarterly earnings reports instead clubbing them along with other services to report revenue. The closest we have to official sales figures for the console come courtesy of VGChartz, which noted that 34.1 million units had been sold worldwide as of the end of 2025. However, without an official comment from Microsoft at the matter, these figures can only serve as estimates.
The figure would be in line with an earnings report by Take-Two Interactive from back in February 2025, where it estimated 94 million combined current-generation consoles having been sold worldwide. Taking confirmed PS5 sales figures out of the number leaves us with an estimate of between 27 and 29 million Xbox Series X/S consoles having been sold as of November 2024.
Recently, however, console sales have seen a major downturn. Xbox, for instance, saw its US sales fall by 70 percent year-on-year, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella referred to this as being the console’s all-time-low performance. Reasons cited for these low sales figures revolve around how expensive the consoles have gotten, thanks in large part to the price hikes that came into effect in May. Thanks to these hikes, the Xbox Series X is now priced at $599.99, while the digital variant is priced at $549.99. The Xbox Series S also saw similar hikes, with the 512 GB model being priced at $379.99, and the 1 TB model priced at $429.99.
The consoles also saw poor sales performance in the UK, which were noted as being down by 39 percent throughout 2025 when compared to the previous year. This was described as being “comfortably the worst year on record for Xbox consoles”.
