Xbox One Sales Reach 26 Million - Report

[UPDATE] In a statement to GameSpot, a Microsoft representative said Microsoft has "nothing new to share" regarding Xbox One sales. Instead, the company is "focusing on engagement as our main metric for success."

The statement went on to reiterate Microsoft's NPD comments from last week.

"December was the biggest month ever for Xbox One sales in the U.S. and Xbox One was the only eighth generation console with year-over-year growth," the representative said. "In addition, Xbox One was the top-selling console over the second half of 2016, following the announcement of Xbox One S at E3. In November and December we saw Xbox Live engagement reach an all-time high of 3.9 billion hours, up 23 percent compared to 2015 driven by fan excitement for the greatest games lineup."

The original story is below.

Microsoft no longer shares Xbox One sales figures, but a new report from research group SuperData claims that the console has reached 26 million units sold since launch in November 2013.

As spotted by GamingBolt, this information was published in a report about the Nintendo Switch, addressing the entire video game market. It's also claimed that the PS4 has an install base of nearly 55 million units; that's slightly above the 53.4 million units that Sony officially disclosed earlier this month.

GameSpot has contacted Microsoft in an attempt to determine if the 26 million figure cited for Xbox One sales is accurate. We will report back with any information we receive from the company.

Instead of hard sales numbers, Microsoft instead talks about monthly active users, which counts the number of people logged into Xbox Live in the past 30 days across Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC. By Microsoft's latest count, it had 47 million monthly active users.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer said it is riskier to divulge Xbox Live active user figures, as these can go down on a quarter-to-quarter basis, while console shipment numbers can only increase.

"If I sold a console two years ago and now it's in a closet collecting dust, that's not good for the gamer, that's not good for the developers, and frankly, it's not good for Microsoft," Spencer said. "The nice thing about us selling consoles is your console install base will always go up. But that's not really a reflection of how healthy your ecosystem is. We focus on the monthly active user base because we know those are gamers making a conscious choice to pick our content, our games, our platform, our service. We want to gauge our success on how happy and engaged those customers are. We need to keep them happy."