Microsoft has announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider, Halo 5: Guardians, Forza Motorsport 6, and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition have all sold more than one million units and sales of 2015 Xbox exclusives were up 88% compared to 2014.
On the Xbox Wire Microsoft declined to give exact sales figures for any of the games but said that its software has helped Xbox One console sales to continually outperform those of the Xbox 360 "at the same point in time in the Xbox 360 generation, making it the best-selling console in Xbox console history".
The platform holder also attributed the system's on-going sales success to the launch of the New Xbox One Experience and backward compatibility, which resulted in more time being spent gaming on Xbox One and Xbox 360 during Christmas week than the previous year.
"2015 was a monumental year for Xbox – the biggest in our history – and we owe it all to our gaming community," Microsoft commented. "We saw record global engagement and sales fuelled by high demand for our greatest games line-up and hardware and accessories like the best-selling Xbox One Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Bundle and our Elite Controller. Every title in our exclusive 2015 holiday games line-up – Halo 5: Guardians, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Forza Motorsport 6 and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition – sold over 1 million units, and the number of Xbox One gamers who played Microsoft Studios-published titles more than doubled compared to 2014."
Speaking to Gamertag Radio, Microsoft marketing executive Aaron Greenberg revealed sales of Xbox One holiday exclusives were up 88% compared to those for 2014.
He said "the final data for December… our exclusive titles this holiday sold 88% more units than our exclusive titles last holiday. So all up, when you take all those great titles and combine them together – Halo, Forza, Tomb Raider, Gears, and Rare Replay – we saw a massive increase in game sales.
"We also saw a lot more console sales," Greenberg continued. "We've seen Live engagement grow year-over-year. We really primarily measure ourselves against our own yardstick of what we did the previous year, so we're seeing fantastic growth and results year-over-year as a result of that line-up."
2014 holiday exclusives included Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Forza Horizon 2, and Sunset Overdrive. Sales data has never been released for any of those games.
With the release of exclusives such as Gears of War 4, Halo Wars 2, Quantum Break, ReCore, Sea of Thieves, and Crackdown 3 Microsoft expects even better sales this year.
"Now as we look forward to 2016, we do have more games, we do expect to sell more games, we do expect it to be even a bigger year than [2015] and we'll be sharing more about that line-up later in the year, but I think for us, gamers have a lot to look forward to," Greenberg added. "We've definitely shared some of our really, really big titles that we're excited about like Gears of War 4, Halo Wars 2, and ReCore and some other big hits that are coming in. We'll talk more about the line-up and some other surprises as we get later into the year."
It was announced earlier today that Scalebound, which was set to release year, has been delayed to 2017.
