A new year usually means new opportunities, but for Microsoft, it’s fighting the same fight for console market share as in previous years. It’s no secret that Xbox sales have fallen quarter after quarter, and this has resulted in 2025 being the company’s worst year yet in the United Kingdom, according to Christopher Dring of The Game Business.
“Sales of Xbox consoles were down 39 percent in the UK during 2025,” tweeted Dring, which means it’s now “comfortably the worst year on record for Xbox consoles.” It follows the worst November yet for the brand in the United States, with console sales dropping 70 percent year-on-year.
While the past is the past and whatnot, the question now is: Will its fortunes improve in 2026? If we’re going by first-party games, it’s certainly possible with Playground Games’ Fable and Forza Horizon 6, The Coalition’s Gears of War: E-Day, Halo Studios’ Halo: Campaign Evolved, and more on the way. We’ll likely hear more about these in this month’s Developer_Direct.
However, with Microsoft’s initiative to bring first-party titles to other platforms and its “This is an Xbox” advertising promoting everything but the consoles, you have to wonder if these will directly impact hardware sales.
Of course, none of this necessarily means that the company is giving up on the same. Xbox president Sarah Bond hyped the next console as being “very premium, very high-end” machine, and rumors point towards 2027 launch (if RAM price increases don’t play spoiler).