An Xbox One player is worth more to Ubisoft than a PlayStation 4 owner

PlayStation 4 is a dominant sales force, but that doesn’t mean that Microsoft’s console is withering and dying.

For every $1 that the average PlayStation 4 owner spent on Ubisoft games in the French publisher’s fiscal third quarter, the average Xbox One gamer spent $1.25 on the same products. This means Ubisoft is seeing a much higher average revenue per player (ARPU) on Microsoft’s console — and this suggests that the Xbox One could have a higher software attach rate (which measures how many pieces of software sold versus the number of consoles sold) than the PlayStation 4. Xbox One will likely never catch up to the PlayStation 4 in terms of market share, but Microsoft can use figures like attach rate and ARPU to help reassure third parties — at least those that make blockbuster games — that the Xbox One is a viable platform. In a console space worth tens of billions of dollars, having a second-place system with an audience that spends a lot of money makes for a healthy software ecosystem. This is especially true considering Xbox One gamers widened that ARPU gap for Ubisoft games when compared to the average for the company’s first nine months of fiscal 2016.