I have spent the last month tracking Xbox’s most played games on the platform in South Africa and these are the results I have uncovered. For the purposes of simplicity, I will discuss the games with different levels of engagement in South African Xbox Live compared to their counterparts in the US version of the service. Titles like Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Roblox will not be mentioned here since the trends are so similar.

Xbox Trends in South Africa

The most notable Xbox trend in South Africa I have noticed is that FIFA, as a franchise, has 3 spots in the top 10. More specifically it holds the 3rd,8th, and 10th spots with the tenth being last year’s entry. On top of that, the Xbox One versions of FIFA rank higher than the Series skews. This clearly indicates that most of the userbase hasn’t upgraded yet. This isn’t surprising since most third-party games still support the older consoles and the most prominent live-service games too. So for the audience that will buy a game console just to play FIFA, there isn’t much value in moving on to newer hardware yet.

Looking at Microsoft’s internal studios Forza Horizon 5 is in a strong 7th place at the time of writing, outside of Minecraft at 11th place. The nearest first-party games are placed at 26th and 46th which are FH4 and Halo Infinite respectively. This shows that outside of Forza Horizon, none of Xbox’s internal teams have a blockbuster that appeals to local sensibilities here.  Moreover, their brand has a tough time differentiating itself from its competitors since third-party games are the backbone of their engagement here especially on Game Pass where Ubisoft’s open-world franchises are consistently the most popular games there.

If Microsoft can target the wider demographic of users they want, by marketing strategically and decisively towards them and keeping better track of which games to prioritise, I feel like they may be better equipped for Xbox dominate the South African market.

Author: Fumo Chabalala

Check out Fumo’s Starfield poem and previous Alan Wake 2 post. The latter links Alan Wake’s American Nightmare with the sequel.

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