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Xbox One totals 5M units sold to retailers worldwide

Following NPD Group's March video game sales report and a strong month for Xbox One exclusive Titanfall, Microsoft revealed that it has shipped 5 million units of its next-gen console.

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Nick_Statt2.jpg
Nick Statt Former Staff Reporter / News
Nick Statt was a staff reporter for CNET News covering Microsoft, gaming, and technology you sometimes wear. He previously wrote for ReadWrite, was a news associate at the social-news app Flipboard, and his work has appeared in Popular Science and Newsweek. When not complaining about Bay Area bagel quality, he can be found spending a questionable amount of time contemplating his relationship with video games.
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Nick Statt

Microsoft is inviting people to test the new Xbox One update.
Microsoft

Microsoft announced Thursday that its Xbox One console has surpassed 5 million units sold-in worldwide. The phrasing is key, as sold-in means that the figure is only the number of consoles sold to retailers and not the number of units actually purchased by consumers.

With 311,000 units sold in the US in March alone -- a 60 percent jump over the Xbox 360 at the same time post-launch -- the Xbox One is far outpacing its predecessor. Microsoft's last lifetime Xbox One sales figure announcement came at the beginning of the year, when it revealed that it had shipped 3.9 million units to retailers and sold to consumers "over 3 million."

Sony, however, announced Wednesday that it had sold-through -- meaning directly sold to consumers -- 7 million PlayStation 4 units worldwide as of April 6. The PS4 is also outpacing the PS3, with a 94 percent sales jump five months into the console life cycle.

Xbox One exclusive Titanfall, which hit store shelves March 11, captured the top spot in March software sales, NPD Group reported today, and is currently the second best-selling game for the console. Microsoft sold 2.7 million Xbox One games in March, and captured 49 percent of all March software sales across platforms with Xbox One and Xbox 360 sales combined.

Still, despite that lead and the aggressive price cutting and bundling strategies to turn Titanfall into a console driver, Microsoft has conceded the hardware sales lead to Sony for the third month in a row, NPD reported.