14 DAY TRIAL // The Xbox One has performed well during November, according to the official sales charts in the United States, and it seems that December will be another solid month for the company, with Microsoft saying that the home console was used for more than 189 million hours in the first two weeks of the 31-day period, which seems to be an impressive number.
The information comes from the official Twitter account of the company, but there are no details offered about how the usage time compared to that seen in previous periods and how much of that number is associated with actual gaming and how much is spent by users simply using the variety of entertainment apps that are included.
It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft aims to offer more usage statistics for the Xbox One in the coming days or weeks, or whether it might even try to compare the performance of its own platform with that of the rival PlayStation 4 from Sony.
At the moment, the company is focused on moving as many home consoles as possible to gamers in time for Christmas and to make sure that its support channels are up and running and ready to deal with potential inquiries from new users.
The Xbox One price cut has made the difference
Microsoft implemented a 50 dollar (37 Euro) price cut for the Xbox One in North America at the start of November, which will only be running until early January 2015, and the results of the move were quickly seen, with the device breaking the hold that the PlayStation 4 had on the sales chart for a ten-month period.
Promotions linked to Black Friday also helped and the company is also running a number of promotions linked to the current holiday season.
The problem is that the current sales pace might be impossible to sustain in January and the Xbox One might actually show worse results than during the same period of this year.
Microsoft is at the moment preparing to run the long awaited multiplayer beta testing period for Halo 5: Guardians, which will be introduced on December 29 and will run for three weeks, giving fans a chance to test the new mechanics that are coming to the franchise, including a powerful sprint and the Smart Scope.
The full game, complete with Master Chief-powered single player, will be coming to the Xbox One late in 2015.
#XboxOne gamers logged 189M hours (21k years) in the first 2 weeks of December. pic.twitter.com/D3dFJM4gYH
— Xbox (@Xbox) December 22, 2014
