Spencer: We didn’t stop revealing Xbox sales figures to hide something

Xbox boss Phil Spencer has insisted that Microsoft did not make the decision to stop confiding Xbox One sales figures in an effort to hide to truth about its performance.

Having spoken about the company’s desire to further unify its games operations across Xbox and PC, The Guardian reports that Spencer monthly active users – as you would see in mobile and online games reporting – is a far more telling gauge of how its content is performing on the market.

This is the critical factor for our teams to gauge our success, because that’s what our partners want to know,” he explained. They want the largest collection of active gamers who are buying and playing games – that is the health metric of any service you talk about – what’s your MAU? It’s not how many consoles you sell. If I sold a console two years ago and now it’s in a closet gathering dust, that’s not good for the gamer, it’s not for the developer and it’s not good for Microsoft.

We didn’t choose this metric to hide something. In fact, we’re more exposed because it shows how many people are actually using our platform and service every month and reporting that publicly. We’ve done it for the development community who want to know how many people they can get to by building these games.

This is the success metric that all of you should be looking at.”