As gaming consoles and digital sales continue to decline and meander for big publishers, some of them are opting to not share their numbers with analysts. Now, Microsoft joins those and will no longer give Circana, a leading US analytics group, its digital sales figures.
This was confirmed by Circana’s Mat Piscatella on Bluesky. Piscatella didn’t provide too many details about what might have prompted Microsoft to make such a decision and merely said that “Microsoft is no longer a digital panel participating publisher.”
This comes just a couple of days after Piscatella published Circana’s July 2026 figures that indicated an 18 percent decline in sales of Xbox consoles compared to the same month last year. Other consoles saw similar drops, or even more significant ones, but it seems Microsoft isn’t so happy about its poor performance being publicly known.
Circana will now have to estimate Microsoft sales for every report, and since a lot of its games, including the Call of Duty franchise, usually top charts every single month, especially in the United States, then we’re going to have a real problem. Estimates and guesses are about in the same category no matter how well-informed they may be, and we’ll not have a clear picture of how dominant CoD and Microsoft really are, if at all.
As shown in Circana’s latest sales post, every single one of the estimated top 10 games is based on projections and analysis rather than raw data points, and with Microsoft now out of the picture, things are going to be even muddier.
