The Xbox One may not be doing as well as the competition on the hardware front, but it appears to be generating lot of revenue for Microsoft regardless. This has to do with game sales on the console—specifically, it sounds like digital game sales on the Xbox One are far higher than they are on PlayStation or Nintendo systems, according to what analyst Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners posted on ResetEra.
This of course should not come as a shock to anyone. Nintendo has historically been weak with digital game sales (though they are doing better on the Switch), and while Sony has started to pick up the slack on this front of late, they cannot possibly compete with the bevy of Xbox initiatives and service offerings, such as Game Pass and backward compatibility, all of which encourage digital game purchases, and assure purchasers that their game libraries will carry over.
This once more indicates that though the generation has been a misstep for Xbox in a lot of ways, they have a foundation to build on and come back from. Hopefully, that’s just what they do next gen.