In an official blog post, Microsoft has announced some numbers ahead of the road to E3 2018. They are all associated with internal Microsoft records and show a lot of growth within the Xbox One ecosystem.
First, let’s look at Microsoft’s Backwards Compatibility numbers. Around May 2018, Microsoft announced users played around 500 million hours of backwards-compatible software. Since then, the number of titles has grown a lot, including the very well-emulated original Xbox games. Now, that number is over a billion, meaning it has doubled in just shy of a year. A lot of articles were floating around about whether or not backwards compatibility has value or is even used, and it’s good for the future of game preservation to see Microsoft finding success with its efforts.
Microsoft also announced that Xbox Live players are up 13%, and Xbox One sales are up 15% from around this time last year. It’s important for Microsoft to release details like these publicly at this stage, as the ongoing narrative pits the PS4 as “winner” and Xbox One as “loser,” with that often being translated to success vs failure by the audience.
Source: Microsoft