The company stopped even reporting sales numbers for the Xbox One years ago, but analysts have estimated that it sold less than half of the PlayStation 4’s 100m+ units. Spencer knows how many Xbox Ones were sold, but he sticks to his guns and won’t tell me.
“I know it seems manipulative and I’ll apologise for that,” he says, “but I don’t want my team’s focus on [console sales]. The primary outcome of all the work that we do is how many players we see, and how often they play. That is what drives Xbox. If I start to highlight something else, both publicly and internally, it changes our focus. Things that lack backwards compatibility become less interesting. Putting our games on PC becomes a reason that somebody doesn’t have to go and buy an Xbox Series X. I’ll hold fast to this. We publicly disclose player numbers. That’s the thing I want us to be driven by, not how many individual pieces of plastic did we sell.”