Thanks to the Xbox leak and other sources, we now have a better idea of the sales split between the two devices.
www.gamespot.com
Series S sold much better early on simply due to the fact that Microsoft had produced more of them and supply for both the Series X and PS5 were limited by semiconductor shortages. Since the end of these shortages and now that people have an actual choice, there's an about even split between the S and X in monthly sales, at least in the USA according to Piscatella. But it's likely that this applies worldwide too. The thing is, though, that Microsoft now needs to go for big discounts on Series S consoles to move stock, so I wouldn't say that demand for them is particularly high.
From there we can guess our way to an LTD split of 60:40 in favor of the Series S by March 2024. Combined Xbox Series sales should be in the neighborhood of 30 million, so it's very probable that the Series S has outsold the Wii U's 13.56m already. From the industry's perspective, that isn't a good thing though, because like I said, developers don't like to make concessions to get their games running on the S. Or in other words, you could say that the current gen installed base of the Xbox that matters is still below 15 million after a good three years on the market. This is the reason for this:
A "major company" who released a big game last year reportedly said, "I don't know why we bothered supporting [Xbox]."
www.thegamer.com
Microsoft's response to troubling Xbox sales is not about initiatives to make Xbox hardware sell more, but rather the opposite. By porting their games to the PS5, they are fueling the expectation that the rest of their portfolio will follow suit eventually, therefore disincentivizing the purchase of an Xbox console. The only bright spot for the industry here is that third parties can feel less worried about scrapping Xbox versions of their games altogether, so they can reduce development costs a bit by targeting only the PS5 and PC. But it's not that much money that is being saved, because porting costs from a PS console to Xbox or vice versa were allegedly only around 10% of the total development costs already two generations ago.
I mean, yeah, there are measures that can be taken to soften the blow of rising costs for the AAA industry, but I have to say that it's not really interesting to discuss them when the companies involved show no intentions to do any of that. Back during 2013 to 2015 it was very interesting to discuss Nintendo's future, because it was clear from their investor briefings that they wanted to get back on top, so speculating about Nintendo's actions was more than a plain thought experiment.
But with Microsoft, we get none of that. Phil Spencer's priority since taking over has been all about PR and trying to give Microsoft a good guy image after the Xbox One disaster. "We are such nice guys that you won't have to buy our hardware to play our games." - That about sums it up when it comes to their business strategy in the console/PC market.