Microsoft's Original Goal Was to Sell 200 Million Xbox One Consoles - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 29 September 2016 / 13,383 Views
Head of Xbox Phil Spencer in an interview with Stevivor stated that when Don Mattrick was running the Xbox division the goal was to sell 200 million Xbox One consoles.
"The goal that the team had was to figure out how could we sell 200 million game consoles," said Spencer. "We’ve never seen a console sell that many units. The biggest individual console, the PS2, did 120 million or something like that.
"The approach the team took was people are moving to OTT Video Services [over-the-top, like Netflix and Stan] 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."
The PlayStation 2 reached 150 million units shipped worldwide as of January 31, 2011.
"We’ve got to do things around the console, like the HDMI pass-through, having voice," he continued. "In order to have voice, you have to have Kinect, the IR Blasting to let it control everything in the house. We’ve got to start up building TV content as a first-party capability.
"I look at all of those and from a pure business standpoint and goals, they’re all completely sound ideas. It’s not like somebody was out with evil thoughts or something. It’s a rational approach. Me, I’ve been on the Xbox since we launched the original Xbox. I’ve played video games my whole life. I still play video games all the time. That’s what I do."
Spencer added that when he came in to run the Xbox division his main goal was to focus on the games.
"When we came in after two-and-a-half years ago and started running the Xbox program, I centred us back on not trying to become something other than a game console," he added. "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.
"I think how it impacted the program — we did some things around making Kinect not required as part of the console because Kinect is a gaming device. It was interesting, but not ubiquitous. It’s not like every game was using it. I said, 'Okay, for people who don’t play Kinect games. No reason that they should have to go buy one.'
"We needed to make sure other features that we’re building are really embracing the games and gamers that are out there in the game development community and that our console is for them first,” he continued. “I’ll say when we look at what people do on the console today, video usage is as high as game usage, so it’s not like people aren’t watching YouTube and aren’t watching Netflix and Amazon and anything else that’s there, but I still think that we have to succeed with gamers first before we get any permission to go do anything else."
"I think that this has been a transformation in the company as well," said Spencer when asked about Xbox Play Anywhere. "The idea that video games are a category that Microsoft should go be in a whole number level, full support, it only happened a number of years ago. We started Xbox because we were worried about the living room; Xbox became ‘how do you shore up computing in the living room?’ The people who were building it were clearly building for a video game console, but I’d say the company’s focus was a little more broad than that.
"Today, if you sit down with Satya Nadella, the CEO, Amy Hood, the CFO of the company, they will talk about gaming as a core capability of Microsoft, not gaming as a bridge to somethings else, but gaming into itself,” he continued. “It’s not just Microsoft, you see Google investing time in gaming, you see Facebook buying Oculus, you see Amazon buying Twitch, you see multi-billion dollar transactions going on at the gaming space, not so you can go be something else, but because gaming is a very high engagement, high monetization use on any electronic device that you see."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
More Articles
Guess they forgot most TVs being sold can do Netflix and YouTube etc. on their own, no need for a console. Even if you didn't have a smart TV something like the Chromecast is much cheaper. Games were always going to be what sold your console.
Also 200m is hilarious, that means they thought not only would they be crazy successful but that there console would sell for like 10+ years.
They expected the Xbox One to sell 50=55 Millions+ than the PS2 and over 2.5x of what the Xbox 360 did.
What you point out is something I think is going to force consoles to go back to their roots. There will soon be no gains to be had from all the Netflix and Hulu bloatware. Instead, it will be better to strip the consoles down to be more like the 6th gen and earlier where they are focused heavily on gaming without all this other guff that smart tvs can do on their own.
@Nuvendil I doubt it, most people don't want to switch around to multiple devices for doing things. Hence why Netflix and such still do so well on the consoles. Why switch over to the TV version when you just turn on one device and it does it all.
The problem is that like @ktay95 said devices like Chromecast/Roku and such can do everything but game for dirt cheap. Nobody is going to buy a $300 console just for Netflix or Amazon. If MS wants to capture that market they need a sub-$100 device. Maybe it can stream games from the X1 and PC but it has to be cheap. Originally years ago I thought they could make a Super Slim 360 with no HD, no disc and have it run on SD cards. It could play all 360 digital games and it would have Netflix and all that on it too. Now it would need to be a whole new device imo that runs X1 games (at least arcade/mobile type games).
But that's my point, people don't want to constantly juggle between the TV and the console if they can use the TV 90% of the time and only turn the console on when they actually want to game specifically. That's why I think the smart TV movement will start to push those functions of consoles aside, because it's just going to become a redundant and inconvenient feature when you can just push the Netflix button on your tv remote and go straight to it. The only things holding this back are that smart tvs are still spreading and many are UHD and you cannot - I repeat, CAN NOT - turn off the largely detested motion interpolation feature many UHD tvs have built in when streaming. So all your shows have that "soap opera" effect that many people hate.
@Nuvendil
I hope so. Game consoles need to be gaming only. They don't need to be a multimidia device, now everything is a multimidia device.
A man can dream.
PS2 reached 155 million units shipped worldwide as of march 31, 2012.
Spencer is a little off on PS2 lifetime sales... 120 million? He should of said at least 140m if he was going to throw out a number for it.
I find it very hard that someone who is both a gamer as a hobbyist and a business man would not know a more accurate number of the highest selling console of all time, surely at a point during their meeting of "we can sell 200 million consoles" at least one person in the room would have put up their hand and said.... errr... that's like... 50million more than the most successful console ever made sir.
Or was it just a room of yes men who all nodded and said lets go?
And yet they still won't release console sales numbers.We're not even sure if they have truly made it past 20 million yet, or not.
I'm pretty sure it passed 20 million already.
It's highly likely, but we'll never know for sure, if they don't tell us something besides things like, there was 8 million hours played this month.
Don't forget how many reloads happened in Halo 5 online play, or How many miles of road were driven in Forza... basically all numbers which make me dread how much monitoring of the online and offline gameplay which is done rather than actually announce numbers of how good their machine is selling.
Well if every console they make is called Xbox One from now on, its possible.
Not unless they are in the game for another... 30 - 40 years with the X1 name.
@Ganoncrotch
Yes, it took 12 years for Sony to sell over 155 millions of ps2. If the Xbox sells half as much, it would take over 30 years .
@Swordmasterman
I just mean that the X1 has been out for 3 years once we reach November and it is just passed the 20m mark, so you would need x10 times that if it continues to sell at the current rate to reach the 200million figure, or 30 years of X1.
Just showed this to some university peers, we are cracking up.
Totally delusional.
TV,TV,TV,Kinect,kinect,TV,TV..... 200m units plan explains why that happend I guess.
They're still paying for that woeful reveal all these years later. It gave PS4 such a head start. Somebody better have been fired over that debacle.
sadly a lot of people would have lost jobs over the reveal in a way, when you think about it they are currently at 1/10th of their predicted machines, meaning obviously less jobs in MS in the Xbox division, so someone might have gotten fired for the blunder that was the reveal... but it cost a lot of potential jobs working with the Xbox as well.
It gave PS4 a little head start. Think about it, PS4 was going to outsell X1 either way. It was just a matter of "by how much?" The debacle just pretty much made the decision for most consumers that much easier to go with a PS4. In Europe, no matter what, PS4 is the prime choice. This whole thing balanced things out in the US, though.
Just think, Microsoft also didn't have a year's worth head start this time around.
It gave PS4 a little head start. Think about it, PS4 was going to outsell X1 either way. It was just a matter of "by how much?" The debacle just pretty much made the decision for most consumers that much easier to go with a PS4. In Europe, no matter what, PS4 is the prime choice. This whole thing balanced things out in the US, though.
Just think, Microsoft also didn't have a year's worth head start this time around.
I think Spencer is dead wrong saying that pivoting Xbox to non-gaming functionality was sound and a "rational approach". It was a dumb idea that lead to creating a too expensive console with an unwanted peripheral. I mean the whole thing had shades of Sony's Blu-ray strategy with PS3. That was a non-gaming-centric decision and it cost Sony dearly. I think one thing that perhaps didn;t allow MS to learn from Sony's mistake was that things turned out OK in the end for Sony and PS3, and if it wasn't for the GFC things might have been been a bit better for Sony. But still in the early days there were articles about death spirals and PS3 only selling 10 million lifetime and so much doom and gloom.
The correct pitch is this is a gaming console that does other entertainment things so that gamers don't have to buy a second device, or a smart TV to watch movies and stream internet content.
consoles were already doing that stuff already
they cant sell consoles in Japan and barely in Europe. How ere they ever expecting to get close to that number?
What on earth made them think that they could not only more than double their 360 numbers but leave consoles like the wii, DS and ps2, wich all had massive casual appeal, in the dust saleswise? With Tv capabilities no less?
Well, they have a 4K Bluray player.
That was an ambitious goal. They were trying to get themselves in the Guinness Book Of World Records with that one. Xbox One is a great console and I hope it continues to sell great numbers.
200 million is impossible for a console, not even PS2 could do that and that was a powerful and necessary machine back in the day, with dvd player and everything. With so many devices nowadays, a console selling 100 million unities is the best they can expect, but I do not expect Xbox One to cross the 50 million mark.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
lel
haha, they put up that console, with a mandatory $100 peripheral, policy terrible enough that they had to scratch it immediately, a history of only selling well in specific regions, and they were hoping for it to be much more successful than the most successful console ever. Talk about delusional. I don't blame Don Mattrick, I blame whoever put him in charge.... Well, and a whole bunch of other people who thought they're making something great.
200M sales, and 3X the power in the cloud.
Maybe they based the sales predictions on the massive group of Forza Spectators in queue for the console in Japan which Yusuf Mehdi shared thinking it was real, easily one of the funniest things about the X1 launch in JP. (Google "Yusuf Mehdi forza crowd" if you have not seen it)
The original Xbox sold 24m units, the X360 sold 85m and the X1 so far has sold just 22m, I mean you're looking at them selling 132million consoles in 3 generations that's over 16 years they've sold half the amount they expected the X1 to move?
Did someone just draw a line on a graph directly from the original Xbox to the X360 and continue it on 5 years upwards and plot the X1 at 200m? would be insane to think that is where this number came from, but I can't see how it came from anywhere else.
200.. 200.. 200 million Xbones?! Maybe 200 million watercoolers! hahaha! There was not a chance in heaven they could sell so many consoles. I don't believe even the market leader PS4 can dream of it.
I think the end goal for companies like Sony and Microsoft is the all in one system( 3do, CDi tried to do that back in the early 90s and then Sony and Microsoft tried to do that with the PS3 and Xbox One) Insane how that old habit never dies!!!!
The Xbox One will be lucky to sell 50+ million consoles this generation. The Xbox One will sell in between the sales of Xbox (24 million) and the sales of the Xbox 360 (85 million)
i haven't seen anyone say this, but they expected to do this WITH connect bundled. Can't believe it.
Well it's doable..... If they gave them away for free lmao
To think they re still in the console business. Like that fool on a party who had little too much to drink and who doesnt know what he is talking about.
Not with that price point, jackass!
Don Mattrick was a special kind... I think MS built some great hardware the past years. Surface, HoloLens, Xbox Scorpio are very promising in their respective markets.
LOL
lmao.
Max XONE 45-50 million. PS4 100-110 million
You're XBO number is fine, but you're low balling the PS4. Thanks to the Pro and eventual cut to $199, the PS4 is going to do much better than the Wii. It could come close to the PS2, though I expect ~125M.
No console will ever sell over 200 million units. Any other thinking is just fantasy.
If the Scorpio and future systems are considered Xbox Ones than yes its possible.
So if they keep making and selling Xbox Ones for the next 27 years they'll break 200 million?
(Going by 3 years = 20 million)
Yeah, this is so true, especially when someone is setting down goals for their console all the time, like it would be something to not know the figures for a console which did okay numbers, but not knowing the amount of consoles which the number 1 selling gaming machine ever sold, I mean it would be like someone trying to get into Olympic running but thinking that Usain Bolt was "sort of fast" competition.
