While the idea of “console wars” might have shifted to a less competitive battle, sales and general engagement indicate Xbox is lagging behind its competitors.
However, there is one area in which it’s still outlasting its rivals – the variety and number of different games that players are playing on these consoles each month.
This is no doubt thanks to one of the most profitable decisions Microsoft has made – Game Pass – which clearly continues to be a driving vehicle behind keeping players interested
Xbox Users Play More Games Than Other Consoles
With the rising costs of games making individual copies a considerable expense, having a subscription service that provides access to other titles will naturally lead players sampling a wider variety of games.
What is less clear, however, is why Game Pass seems to be more successful at this than PlayStation’s subscription service – PlayStation Plus.
On Xbox in August 2025, Xbox users were found to have played 5.7 games on average. This is compared to 3.7 on PlayStation and 4.5 on Steam. These findings suggested that Game Pass subscribers were more active than that of PlayStation Plus, who play two games fewer on average a month by comparison.
The Cost of Gaming
This likely reinforces some of the benefits of Game Pass, such as allowing players to play a greater variety of games without needing to spend money on each one, making the medium as a whole more accessible.
However, this is not something that comes without caveats, for there’s been a lot of discussion lately about how damaging Game Pass is to the industry’s sustainability, with smaller developers increasingly marginalised.
Xbox Users Play For Less Time
While Xbox might be excelling in this regard, though, Xbox users spend less time playing than those on PlayStation or Steam.
In August, this averaged at 7.7 hours per person on Xbox, 12.7 on PlayStation and 11.9 on Steam. If you look at the sales numbers per console, Xbox lags behind again, with PlayStation 5 sales over 80 million and that of Xbox Series X/S around 30 million. The Nintendo Switch 2 had reportedly sold 6 million as of August 2025, which was only two months after its release.
