DISCLAIMER!

This is something I find really annoying; a lot of people don't know what the "official numbers" actually mean, and so they think the games are performing much better than they actually are, which is 100% done on purpose, because it's literally a marketing scheme, especially in cases of games that are performing poorly.
So let me break it down for those who are interested:

"X units shipped world wide!"- literally just how much copies they produced and sent around the world, not actual sales
"X units sold!" - that includes gamepass, bundles and all -% sales, so not full price sales
"X active players!" - that includes free copies, an "active player" doesn't mean it's a paying player, be data might be from a free weekend period, trials or demos
"X copies sold" - sale-ins, which mean units sold to retailers

We split sales into two categories; sale-ins and sale-throughs, and the first one refers to ALL sales including selling to retailers, and latter are actual sales, the real demand, you'll most likely never see it mentioned, because it's the closest to truth of how the game actually performs.

Every game needs to make much more back than it costs to make, because studios don't need to just cover the production cost, but also the cost of marketing, distribution (either physical or platform costs), revenue and taxes.

So if a game has a budget of 100 million dollars, they would need to sell around 5.6 million copies AT A FULL PRICE assuming the cost is $70, to just break even, and everything beyond that number is profit IF we don't count in costs of post launch support, and live operation.

I wish much more people realized how the industry actually works, and the official numbers are usually misdirection in order make the customers believe they're buying way better product than they actually are. Well, mostly to play the investors to be honest, but I've noticed we suffer from it as well, so don't let them fool you.