Microsoft has confirmed that production on new Xbox One consoles was quietly discontinued at the end of 2020 to focus on production on its current consoles, according to The Verge.
“To focus on the production of Xbox Series X|S, we stopped production for all Xbox One consoles by the end of 2020,” senior director of Xbox console product marketing senior director, Cindy Walker said in a statement to The Verge.
The production of Xbox One X and digital Xbox One S was discontinued in July 2020 before the launch of the Xbox Series X|S. Later at the end of 2020, Microsoft quietly stopped Xbox One S production, leaving retailers to sell out the remaining units they had in stock at the time.
The news comes after reports confirmed that Sony is actually going in the opposite direction of Microsoft and is producing more last-gen consoles. Sony has confirmed PS4 production has been extended, even though a Bloomberg report suggested it would discontinue at the end of 2021.
The PlayStation company has told its partners to keep producing PS4 consoles – which have already shipped 120 million units so far – and is looking to produce one million consoles in 2022. Meanwhile, the company struggles to meet the demand for next-gen consoles as the PS5 remains in scarce supply due to component constraints. It remains to be seen if newly announced PlayStation Studios titles will be announced for cross-gen as games like Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarök and Gran Turismo 7 are coming to both PlayStation platforms in 2022.
This isn’t unique to just PlayStation but Xbox as well. While in recent months, the Xbox Series S has become easier to purchase, Microsoft is still finding it hard to keep up with Xbox Series X demand from consumers.
Xbox head, Phil Spencer said in a New York Times interview that the consistent Xbox shortages aren’t the result of fewer consoles being produced but an entirely different factor. Spencer believes the shortages are the result of high demand from consumers which has surged which is evident in console sales during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“When you think about trying to go get an Xbox or a new PlayStation right now in the market, they’re really hard to find. And it’s not because supply is smaller than it’s ever been. Supply is actually as big as it’s ever been. It’s that demand is exceeding the supply for all of us,” Spencer said in a New York Times interview.
“At this point, we’ve sold more of this generation of Xboxes, which is Xbox Series X and S, than we had any previous version of Xboxes. So it’s our job to get the supply there to meet that demand.”
