Over the past year, the sales for next-gen consoles like the Xbox Series X and Series S have been hindered by hardware supply issues, among other problems that make these consoles hard to find. Stores quickly sell-out of consoles and then have to wait weeks for a resupply. Happily, for the current console manufactures, Microsoft and Sony, demand remains high for these systems.Xbox Series X is over a year old, and can still be difficult for players to get their hands on. Luckily for Microsoft, however, it seems to be handling the hardware supply issue a little better than Sony and its ever-elusive PS5 resupplies.The Xbox Series X is now even breaking sales records for the console brand according to new figures released by The NPD Group, a market research company. The Xbox Series X had already broken records after it became the fastest selling Xbox console when it first released in November 2020. But now, it has beaten Xbox’s previous record for sales in both units and dollars for the month of March. The previous unit sales record for this month hadn't been beaten since 2011, two years before the release of the Xbox One, which sold underwhelmingly compared to current Xbox Series X sales.
The figures were posted to Twitter by NPD’s Video Game Industry Advisor, Mat Piscatella. Xbox’s sales figures stopped being provided by Microsoft after the company had apparently switched from sales performance to consumer engagement as the metric for measuring a product’s success. Despite this, Xbox’s sales figures seem to be on the rise, and breaking its March record for both unit and dollar sales illustrates how well the Xbox Series X is selling.
It should be noted that NPD’s figures only cover Xbox’s sales in the US market, and do not reflect how well the console is selling in other regions. It is also predicted that the supply chain issues that have been affecting all console hardware manufacturers have yet to be fully ironed out, and this could continue to hurt future sales. However, this does mean that the Xbox Series X may not have peaked just yet in its sales, and more monthly sales records could continue to be broken.
Piscatella’s NPD figures thread on Twitter also includes the sales figures for games sold in the month of March. This reveals that in dollar sales, Elden Ring is still the best-selling game not only on Xbox consoles, but across PlayStation and PC as well. The thread also reveals that Elden Ring is second only to Call of Duty: Vanguard for sales over the last 12 months, which is a big deal for an ostensibly single-player fantasy game.