The new Xbox One X is coming, but it’s hurting current sales, says GameStop in new earnings report

Gamestop, one of the largest video games retailers worldwide, shared some interesting details about Xbox sales in its latest earnings reports. As Microsoft now longer reports Xbox One sales, preferring to highlight Xbox Live engagement in its quarterly earnings reports, it’s now really difficult to estimate the console’s performance. But as GameStop recently suggested, the upcoming release of the Xbox One X may well be hurting current Xbox sales.

Gamestop didn’t really go into details in its second quarter results, but this bit spotted by Ars Technica sums it all up: “New software sales and pre-owned sales declined 3.4% and 7.5%, respectively, impacted by lagging Xbox One sales.” In an earning calls yesterday, GameStop CFO Robert Lloyd was a bit more specific. “In both new and preowned, we’re seeing underperformance in Xbox One versus PS4, which we believe is due to the coming Xbox One X launch,” he explained.

Of course, this is just data from a single retailer (though a very big one), and it doesn’t necessarily reflects the state of Xbox One sales worldwide. Still, we wouldn’t be surprised if Xbox One S sales took a hit a couple of months ahead of the release of the much more powerful Xbox One X. As it turns out, the much-anticipated new console apparently beat Microsoft’s expectations by a wide margin: Microsoft confirmed earlier today that Xbox One X was the fastest selling Xbox pre-order ever, though Microsoft didn’t say how many units have been pre-ordered so far (and pre-orders are not actual sales, to be fair).

We don’t expect Microsoft to share any hard data anytime soon, but the company seems confident to have an hit on its hands with the Xbox One X. “All the signs are that it’s gonna be the number one hit product of this Holiday, so we’re gonna keep up with demand the best that we can,” shared Xbox Marketing Chief Aaron Greenberg earlier this week.