PS5 expected to overtake Series X sales | S 2 to 1 in 2022
It will take time for the acquisition to materialize and bear fruit.
Xbox and Activision dominated the headlines last week. That’s because out of nowhere, Microsoft confirmed that it had acquired Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The deal, which is by far the largest in the gaming industry, isn’t expected to be finalized until fiscal 2023. However, Xbox hopes the effects of its gargantuan acquisition will begin to be felt immediately.
There was evidence of this just hours after the news broke, with Sony’s valuation plummeting by $20 billion in a single day. That’s not necessarily the kind of change Xbox is looking to bring about, however. What he wants is for more people to buy his consoles and for more people to join the 25 million subscribers who have already signed up for Game Pass.
According to the experts at Ampere Analysis, this kind of change won’t happen right away. They expect the Xbox Series X | S will sell nine million consoles in 2022, while the PS5 will double that figure and displace 18 million. As highlighted above, the acquisition won’t be finalized until well after the end of this year, so maybe those numbers aren’t too much of a concern for Xbox, at least not yet.
What the gulf symbolizes is the need for Xbox to do something. This is one of the many reasons why bringing Activision Blizzard under its growing umbrella is extremely important. Although everyone involved insists that Activision’s biggest series will continue to be cross-platform, there will be a time when Call Of Duty and Overwatch become Xbox exclusives. These two titles alone will ensure that more people will opt for an Xbox over a PlayStation in the future, not to mention the multiple other Acitivion-owned IPs now available to Xbox.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Ampere’s analysis is that once again, the Nintendo Switch will outsell the much newer PlayStation and Xbox consoles. 21 million units, to be exact. The Switch had a bumper Christmas in the UK, selling 500,000 consoles in the last two months of the year. This saw it pass the PS5 over the finish line to become Britain’s best-selling console in 2021.
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