Entertainment industry firm Ampere Analysis has posted a new report on the gaming market in 2022, and it makes for some pleasant reading for Xbox fans. The firm has updated its sales estimates for Xbox Series X|S consoles up to the end of 2022, while also claiming that Microsoft gained some market share from Sony last year.
So, here are the firm's sales estimates. Ampere claims that Microsoft sold 18.5 million Xbox Series X|S consoles from launch through 2022, while Sony hit 30 million PS5 sales in the same time frame.
While there's a clear gap in hardware sales that favours Sony, the firm believes Microsoft gained market share on the PlayStation owner in 2022. These gains stand at roughly 1.3% across hardware, software and service sales.
"Sony continues to lead the global console market with a 45% share of total console hardware, games and services spending taking place across PlayStation consoles. This is a 1.3% fall from 2021, which Microsoft claimed.
Nintendo shed 0.5% share, while Microsoft’s share grew from 25.5% to 27.3% as spending on Xbox console hardware and console-based Game Pass services grew."
While this looks like good news to us, Ampere Analysis does expect Sony to gain hardware ground in 2023, largely down to stock availability. Sony recently claimed that its ongoing PS5 stock issues were finally sorted going into 2023, while Ampere reckons Xbox will still struggle to fulfil Xbox Series X shipments until the latter half of this year.
Of course, this is all sales 'estimates' from the analysis firm, with Microsoft no longer providing official console sales data at this stage. The figures seem about right though (maybe even a little conservative), and it's good to see Xbox having potentially made some market share gains in 2022.