For the month of December, Xbox sold 1,511,000 units across both its Xbox One and Xbox One S consoles, which puts Xbox sales up 10% year-over-year for December. Sony took the sales lead selling 1,568,000 consoles during December , with 238,000 units of its PlayStation 4 Pro edging Microsoft into second place.

NPD Group research retail sales in the US, offering Sony and Microsoft the opportunity to say who "won" the sales race for each month. The actual figures are a closely guarded secret, until now!

While Microsoft doesn't offer hard sales figures itself, Redmond did issue a statement to us last week confirming that it had seen year-over-year growth for Xbox, with record-breaking Xbox Live engagement for November and December.

December was the biggest month ever for Xbox One sales in the U.S. and Xbox One was the only eighth generation console with year-over-year growth, according to NPD. In addition, Xbox One was the top-selling console over the second half of 2016, following the announcement of Xbox One S at E3. In November and December we saw Xbox Live engagement reach an all-time high of 3.9 billion hours, up 23 percent compared to 2015 driven by fan excitement for the greatest games lineup. Looking ahead, we expect 2017 to be a special year for gamers thanks to the upcoming launch of the most powerful console ever in Project Scorpio and a terrific portfolio of new games with Xbox Live support on Xbox One, Windows 10 or both. – Mike Nichols, Corporate Vice President, Xbox Marketing, Microsoft

The sales of the PlayStation 4 Pro are particularly interesting considering Microsoft will launch a similar Xbox One "upgrade" console towards the end of 2017, Project Scorpio. There are only a few dozen titles utilizing the PlayStation 4 Pro's specs to offer improved visuals as of writing, but by the time Project Scorpio comes out, there will be much, much more. Microsoft will no doubt be looking to create a compelling lineup of true 4K games to match when Scorpio lands during the holiday season of 2017, and thanks to UWP, it may just achieve its aims.