Microsoft Earnings Include Xbox Predictions
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to Microsoft's press release discussing sales figures and plans for Xbox hardware and software, as part of their 4th quarter earnings. According to the release, "Since the launch of Xbox in 2001, Microsoft has sold over 9.4 million Xbox consoles worldwide, and by the end of the next fiscal year, Microsoft expects to have sold 14.5 to 16.0 million consoles." Xbox Live has "..over 500,000 subscribers worldwide participating in more than 1 million game sessions every week", and Halo 2 will be out by June 2004 (the end of next fiscal year), but other than saying that the Xbox-related Home and Entertainment section "..posted stronger than expected results in the fourth quarter, with 8% revenue growth over the prior year", there was no specific statement about Xbox's overall financial gain or loss.
Why hasn't MSFT tried to take over Square/Enix? That could move some consoles. It's not like the DOJ is going to do anything about it.
Well you can guess what that means then. You can be sure the second the xbox actually makes a profit (?) it will be all over every news source in the world.
Surprisingly few, they have one of the highest attach rates in the business, I think they mentioned that they are selling something like 5 games with each unit. (It's possible that they were counting the two free games in that, but even so that is right up there with Sony, and ahead of Nintendo. Loss is probably less than $100 per box now, given how quickly component prices fall.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
However Microsoft isn't saying and most people aren't asking how many of those projected 15 million units will be made into Linux boxes for which the owner isn't buying any games.
I suspect the number is somewhere near twelve.
Okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but the Xbox Linux statistics page shows 313,000 downloads, and most of those are probably "hmm, I'm curious, lets see what the code looks like..."