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Xbox Marketing VP Says 10M 360s In First Year
Peter Moore, the VP for Xbox marketing, has publicly stated that the Xbox 360 will sell 10 million units by the end of the first year. From the article: "The advantage of launching first for Microsoft, though, is that it has the chance to establish itself as a prominent next-generation format without initial competition. 'The target of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform,' said Moore at the ELSPA event. The target is certainly an ambitious one, as the current lifetime to date total for Xbox consoles sales worldwide is only around 21 million after almost four years on sale."
That's a lot of modchips that have to get made.
Trolling is a art,
This doesn't seem an especially unrealistic estimate. If anything, I'd say it's slightly lower than where MS should be aiming, given their stated intention to rival the PS3. After all, they've got an entire Christmas season to themselves, they've got a pretty well oiled marketing machine and they're going to be hitting the Japanese market *much* harder than they did last time around. I know that's not saying much, but with the developers they have on board this time, it could all end very differently.
If I had to hazard a guess as to why they've picked the 10 million figure, I'd say that they've decided: a) that it sounds a nice big number to people who don't know the console market b) that they're probably not going to have to give embarrassing explanations when they fall short of it and c) that there's a good chance they'll exceed it, in which case they can have a good gloat.
'The target of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform'
Well I set a target of having sex with 10 billion hot university girls by Christmas. TRY BEATING THAT MOMENTUM!
A fr1st pr0s7 from an hour ago! Woo, too bad they rejected my article on making your own home-brew TARDIS...
Trolling is a art,
Where does the number come from? They have to have some kind of justification for it, especially when the article ends with "lifetime to date total for Xbox consoles sales worldwide is only around 21 million after almost four years on sale."
Seriously, is there some context for this? Can we read more of what Moore said somewhere?
more of the same on Twitter.
First, that figure is what they hope to sell, second if you believe history repeats itself then take note that the Dreamcast came out about the same amount of time ahead of the PlayStation 2.
It worked so well for the Dreamcast
as a prominent next-generation format without initial competition.
Because inadequate testing and rushing into deployment has never given MS problems before, right? Oh wait...
"The target of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform"
"Also, being provided as free gifts in happy meals gives tremendous momentum to a platform."
"Buy an XBox360 or we kill this dog."
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
"The target of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform"
No, jackass, the sale of 10 million units gives tremendous momentum to a platform. The target just gives you an excuse to run your mouth off and get it printed by gullible editors.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The BBC version of the story reports the same speech quite differently.
Mr Moore actually said Microsoft could reach the 10 million mark in 12 to 16 months.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
since it's from the VP of marketing, it simply will become true.
Does anyone know how many xbox systems were sold in the first year alone?
Look at this:
MS predicts 5 million for sales in first fiscal year.
The result?
Sales were 3.9 million.
Not too bad, but not perfect. 20% off. Still, it's better to underpromise and over-deliver than the other way around.
Taco is a tool. I posted this, then they made the story 'sub only' and it ate my post so I had to re-type it. Lesson? Type first in notepad, then paste.
I've been saying it all along. Microsoft consider themselves to be media darlings. They've dominated the commercial OS market for so long that they assume that they can just insinuate themselves into any other market, and people will listen to them. When they succeed, they trumpet their forecasts of success and always attribute it to, of all things, innovation. [Pause for laughter.] When they fail (and they DO fail quite often, more often than the typical newsmedia consumer realizes), they give the same old lines about having enough money to sustain them until they eventually win.
With this particular announcement, MS has already gotten the more naive among us to question, "OMGWTF, that's so cool, what does MS know that we don't know?!" The answer, of course, is that there are people out there who will believe everything they read and hear.
What on Earth does that have to do with the X360? Other than it coming out ahead of the competition, Sega's failures there bear no similarity to the situation Microsoft faces. Sega had already had the MegaCD, the 32 addon for the Megadrive/Genesis, and the Saturn be rejected by consumers. They had unfortunately been out of it for a while by the time the Dreamcast launched.
Microsoft has had a great deal of success with the Xbox, by some measures overtaking one of the biggest names in the industry (Nintendo) and by many more leading the pack with their online gaming service - something that many would consider to be the next Big Thing for consoles after it changed the PC gaming industry so drastically over the last decade.
All of this is of course ignoring the fact that MS just won't let this fail. The Xbox is a massive end-run to get a Microsoft device in the living room, to get their brand recognition up for people that don't go near computers, and to use as a platform for the rest of their intentions such as in IPTV. It's a Microsoft reach around so you won't notice the pounding they're going to give you, and I doubt they'll be willing to pull out early.
So to speak.
This comment was formatted for readability, but I forgot the line break tags
Sales of 10 million units in 12-18 months are not too unrealistic to expect; that is unless your platform is called the N-Gage. The question that is really important is how many 360s do they have to sell in 12-18 months? This question is more centered around what the minimum number of XBox 360 systems that have to be sold to consider the platform viable.
I know that more people will question the potential sales of the Revolution, but in all honesty, the XBox 360 will need to be far more successful in order to generate a follow-up system. The reason for this is that Nintendo's only buisness is making videogames (and their systems) and Nintendo is a profitable at this buisness; on the other hand Microsoft has tons of other buisnesses and is loosing a lot of money trying to establish a presence in this industry. If Microsoft continues loosing money in this generation, I suspect that they will need to steal a ton of market share in order to justify the continued losses to their shareholders.
Well, if they can get the price point right, I think it's plausible.
..." according to the industry watchers.
I think if they release it for around $200-225, then it will definately be do-able.
Before you start telling me how they won't release that low, remember the hype around PSP: at first there was "no way that it would be less than $400
If you combine this with the $60+ (and rising!) price point for newer games, I think the whole thing is plausible.
I know I'll get one. Then again, I plan on getting a PS3 as well (but only after the first gen hardware is gone).
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
Remember, this isn't a question of a market demanding a good at a certain price point: MS, just like Sony, is going to lose millions of dollars in their first year of giving away razors, one way or the other.
10 Million might just be doable if they can make them fast enough. I know I would have had a PS2 sooner if it were possible.
Theres no way MS can have 3 PPC processors in a xbox 360 by the end of THIS year at under $800 They might subsitize the cost like they did the xbox, but I doubt you can get what a $3000 MAC cost for less than $800
Plus they want to make money this time around so they can't sell em for as cheap as they did before without everyone wanting to mod chip it again.
Well We'll see
Ten million units is a lot units to be pushing out in one year. The only way they can do that is to hit a sweet price point that anyone can buy at. A $100 USD XBox 360? Nah...
Dident they say they were going to get a bilion gamers on xbox live at E3? So it would take them 10 years to do that, lol.
Unlikely, since most of the talent left and started a different company.
http://www.frd.co.uk/
Granted, most of their titles have been Bond successors. BUT they have been VERY good Bond successors, and the company has been successful, timely, and their games are getting really great reviews. The Rare that Microsoft owns now is not the Rare you know!
Guy #1: "Man, this Xbox we're working on is gonna be awesome."
Guy #2: "I know. We're gonna sell like a million units."
Guy #1: "No, way, man. We're gonna sell like ten million."
Guy #2: "Dude, that's awesome. We should tell people."
Guy #1: "Heh. You said units."
People (normal non-fanboy people) don't buy consoles for the console. They buy them for the games. If MS wants to sell 10M 360's in a year, they had better be standing on Bugie's throat for Halo 3...
I think what you're saying is biased, a little harsh, and not entirely accurate; the biggest problem is that you're only seeing one side of the situation.
...
Microsoft is trying to move to the next generation in order to produce a platform that is self sustaining; this is because they're trying to stop the bleeding of money from their entertainment division. For the most part this decision was made pretty early on in the XBox's life cycle and they approached ATI and IBM to produce their processors; their hardware wasn't produced in a rapid or haphazard manner. The hardware isn't the problem at all; much like the XBox, PS2 and Gamecube, when the hardware is announced it seems so impressive (Oh my god, they put a 733 MHZ Celeron into the XBox!!! That's amazing, that processor alone would cost you $250!!!) but rapidly becomes less than cutting edge; this isn't that big of a problem for game performance because you're not running a big clunky OS on any of the consoles.
The part of your post I think you're bang on about is Microsoft is loosing the PR war. Microsoft has been selling 'features' of the XBox 360 with little regard for the So-What factor.
The XBox 360 has HDTV! SO What?
The XBox 360 has Micropayments! SO What?
This produces an image in the mind of the average person of a system that only apeals to the geekiest people in the world (not an image to associat yourself with for highly image conscience people); and at the same time doesn't actually apeal to the geekiest people in the world (most geeks I know are more interested in the possibility of playing Super Mario 3 again). This is problematic because if Sony can label itself as 'Cool', Nintendo can label the Revolution as 'inovative yet retro', and Microsoft is left with 'owned by geeky virgins who live with their parrents' which systems do you think are going to be popular to say that you own?
Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about.
The 360 hardware was started long after the PS3 hardware was started being designed and worked on. And the 360 is supposed to be on the store shelves ~6 months before the PS3 and Revo.
Hardware is major problem for MS. A large portion of their xbox installed base bought an xbox because of it's marketed power - regardless of the fact that was nothing more than hype.
The 'let's rename our devkit'/XNA stuff should be a clear indication of just how desperate MS is over their hardware problem.
Spinning weak hardware is good enough to an installed base that is use to claiming their system is the most powerful is a disaster waiting to happen for MS. And they know it.
There is a good chance MS will pull the plug on the 360 in the next couple of months. They haven't spent the big money of stocking up on shipping hardware yet. At worst it would be a brief and ugly PR hit. The days of 'damn the losses' are over at MS, and unless the bean counters see some sign of life in the 360 project soon it's in line for the axe. MS has been cutting a billion+ a quater for the past year to hit the street numbers. People can talk all they want about Big Plans and other pie in the sky talk, but right now the Home Entertainment division is a big fat target for cutting. The are millions and millions of shares still waiting to be unloaded by the MS insiders before the stock price sinks into the teens. Another multi-billion dollar marketplace fiasco like the first xbox is something no one who matters at MS is in any mood for.
3DO sold more than Xbox in Japan.
They've spent too much on building up an image with the XB1 to abandon the X360 before it's released. I'd expect them to keep it going for at least two years (they estimate that they'll make a profit in 2007, they won't cut it earlier). They know it's not going to make money immediately and they'll try to offset at least some of the losses. Plus I'm not too sure how the law would like it if MS cancelled a product so many companies are investing money into (exclusive games anyone?). No, wait until 2007, when the PS3 and Revolution will hit full force, then you'll see MS decide on the future of the Home Entertainment Division (i.e. they might be the first against the wall when the Revolution comes).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
10 million Xbox2 by the end of year? No problem!
Start paying all employees in Xbox2s instead of money...
What planet do you live on? The PPC chip was in full scale production long before IBM Toshiba and Sony started the Cell development process. The Xbox 360 has three OPTIMIZED PPC chips. Optimizing an architecture to a specific set of specifications is easy compared to developing an entirely new architecture. Also, the costs Sony has incurred while in the process of developing the new architecture will be seen in the differing initial price points (PS3 $465USD vs XBox360 $299-325USD as stated in the gaming media by each companies representatives). In essence, your post is FUD
God I wish every fucking xbox fanboy would just fucking die.
PS3/Cell development started IMMEDIATELY after the PS2 hardware was finalized you dope. The PS3 hardware has been in design and production almost twice as long the slapped together whatever we have laying around at IBM 360 CPU.
And finally dumbshit, the PS3 will not be priced at 465.
Please, do the world a favor, just fucking kill yourself, now. The world is sick of the MS hype and xbox fanboy lies.
Your just angry because you know its true you fucking asshat. Riddle me this shit for brains; how long has Apple been using the PPC chip? Definitely BEFORE the PS2 came out. The XBox360 uses the PPC chipset, it is only modified to a specific hardware specification (not unlike the Mac). The Cell architecture is completely different from the PPC architecture. Catch a clue, and don't talk shit about stuff you have NO UNDERSTANDING ABOUT!
The retailers place purchase orders. Ten million confirmed purchase orders does not necessarily mean ten million units will be sold to a consumer.
And if they define it as ten million units sold to a consumer... I might not hold my breath on that one.
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