PS4 Has Sold 50 Million Units — But How's The Xbox One Doing?

The PlayStation 4 has been selling steady since its launch back in 2013 with the console getting quite a bit of love with firmware upgrades, a profoundly admirable set of exclusives, and even hardware upgrades. It's not hard to reaffirm the fact Sony has been quite busy to make their sales numbers hit the 50 million units mark.

But what about Microsoft's Xbox One with the launch of the Xbox One S, Dead Rising 4, Gears of War 4, and even Forza Horizon 3? What are their numbers like? According to the website VGChartz.com, the Xbox One S is hurting in its total sales numbers, hovering just above 25 million units — but that's without Microsoft having reported their sales totals from the holidays including Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

While it's noticeable that Xbox One is lacking in sales, the Nintendo 3DS saw its sales skyrocket thanks to the $99 USD offer through all retailers while supplies lasted. While many may find this troubling for Microsoft, it doesn't hurt them at all since they haven't reported in their total sales from the holiday specials.

What Should Microsoft Prepare For In The Future?

With the Microsoft Xbox Scorpio in the works, a shroud of mystery has surrounded this powerful piece of hardware. Microsoft has openly admitted that their upcoming "premium console" plans to break tradition with being able to run games in native 4k, but they've also come out and said their console will be able to support things such as the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift (we can only assume at this point that this is still the plan).

This will allow the PlayStation 4 Pro to have a true competitor in terms of power, but it will also give Microsoft a chance to compete against Sony for sales totals in the upcoming months. With Project Scorpio having an 8-core CPU and a graphics card that'll run 6TFLOPs (a trillion floating point operations per second) of power and 320GB/sec of memory bandwidth, it's safe to say that Microsoft could rebound and make a push against Sony.

This will put the Scorpio's graphics card will be on par with Nvidia's bleeding edge GeForce GTX 1070 line, which has 6.5TFLOPs of power behind it. Unfortunately, Microsoft will have to make up for this as the console isn't slated until sometime next fall and will be considered a mid-range PC at that time. By that point, I suspect Microsoft will be positioning the Scorpio as a console to end all consoles with interchangeable, upgradable parts.

Microsoft Should Disclose Their Total Sales by the End Of January

If you are waiting to see when those sales totals come in, you're best waiting for Microsoft to disclose their sales totals by the end of the fiscal year. For now, we can assume that Microsoft is in a comfortable spot with the Xbox One.