Microsoft said late Thursday that it had sold 1.2 million Xbox Ones during the November sales month, topping sales of competing consoles for the period.
Microsoft cited sales figures from NPD, which tracks retail sales of game consoles, OCs and more in the United States.
Overall, video game sales at U.S. retail stores totaled $2.41 billion, down 11 percent from a year earlier, according to market researcher NPD Group. Hardware sales dipped 23 percent to about $1 billion. In part, that might have been due to the fact that last year was the first year of the latest generation of games, and gamers snapped up next-gen consoles. This year was down a bit, as a result. (NPD didn’t release numbers for the other consoles.)
Still, it was good news for Microsoft.
“Response to the holiday lineup of games on Xbox One was incredible, with Xbox One fans buying more games in November in the U.S. than any other gen-eight platform and enjoying over 357 million hours of gameplay globally,” said Mike Nichols, corporate vice president for Xbox marketing, according to Geekwire and other reports.
Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox One console by $50 as a response to what some considered to be too high of a price for Microsoft’s console. That cut happened in late October, right in time for the November sales period.
Why this matters: Microsoft, burned by all sorts of troubles during the Xbox One launch—a restrictive policy on used games, an emphasis on entertainment content rather than traditional games, a Kinect sensor that gamers didn’t want to pay for—needed some juice to get back in line with Sony, its chief competitor. A price cut was the easiest way to do that, and it paid off.