The final production lines of the Xbox One series of consoles have been shuttered. Microsoft has announced that the company will no longer produce the console. Having been launched in 2013, the Xbox of the 8th console generation competed directly against the PS4, but never really captured a huge number of sales.
In a statement to The Verge, Xbox’s senior director of console product marketing, Cindy Walker, said, “To focus on the production of Xbox Series X / S, we stopped production for all Xbox One consoles by the end of 2020.”
It’s pretty easy to see why they made this call. the Xbox One line just isn’t selling anymore. Video game industry analyst Daniel Ahmad estimated that approximately 41 million units had been as of January 2019. That fell far behind the likes of the PS4 and Switch, which handily outsold the team green offering.
Moving away from its predecessor’s PowerPC-based architecture, the Xbox One marked a full shift to the x86 architecture powering modern PCs. These similarities in UI and app support were obvious, as Microsoft intended the Xbox One line to be the one-stop shop for entertainment. The effort was hampered by the failure of the Kinect, which the gaming giant originally pushed as vital to these consoles. A few years later and Kinect was gone, but Xbox One remained.
Aiming to better compete with the later console iterations and new launches like the Switch, Microsoft began issuing new SKUs. Xbox One Elite became the first, launched in November 2015, it featured a 1 TB storage solution and slightly better performance architecture. Various other consoles joined the lineup over the years. The Xbox One X was later issued, and then also discontinued. The One S model remains the only model currently in production that’s affected by this shutdown.
It would seem that Microsoft is putting all its weight behind the Xbox Series X/S consoles. They’re clearly aiming to offer more consoles, but an ongoing chip shortage is making any production goals hard to hit. Add to that the shipping slowdowns caused by COVID and other problems, and even getting units to store shelves seems difficult.
On the competitor side, Sony remains resolute. Sony confirmed that PS4 production is still ongoing, providing a quote to Bloomberg saying the system “is one of the best-selling consoles ever, and there is always crossover between generations.”
