Circana's Mat Piscatella has today provided some fresh sales data for games industry spending in the US - and it's provided some quite interesting stats for Xbox in 2025. According to the data firm, 75% of Xbox console sales so far this year have been for digital-only units - spread across the white Xbox Series X and all Xbox Series S systems.
With the new digital-only Xbox Series X console only being introduced late last year, this is the first full quarter that Microsoft's flagship current-gen system has contributed to digital-only console sales. Before that, digital-only hardware sales were entirely down to the less-powerful Series S, of course.
This is quite an interesting development, then, and it suggests that the newer and slightly cheaper Series X system has likely eaten into Microsoft's overall Xbox Series X sales. Of course, without the actual numbers directly from Microsoft we can't see the full console SKU breakdown, but this digital-only split definitely feels high for 2025 so far.
Elsewhere, there's some slightly more positive news for Xbox in terms of year-on-year console sales overall. While March 2025 hardware sales in the US were down 9% on March 2024, that's a significantly smaller drop-off than others we've seen recently - and was the lowest drop of all the main platform holders last month.
Anyway, we assume strong digital-only console sales will be seen as a good thing from Microsoft's point-of-view; it locks people into using its digital storefront and being more tempted by Xbox Game Pass as a way of accessing titles.