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."

Comments

History

[MBraynard]

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.

See what I mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Self-fulfilling Expectations

[TheoB]

I suspect this isn't just marketing promises: Microsoft has a fair deal of control over how many 360's are sold in the first year. If they've decided that a 10 million unit head-start on Sony's US launch is what they need to compete this generation, they can cut prices and advertise sufficiently to get 10 million consoles into homes.

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.

Re:10 million?

[grub]

Personally, if every modded Xbox out there exploded and put the people using it in the hospital for 6 weeks, I would do a happy dance at all the cheaters and losers who would get to suffer.

I have an Executor3 in my xbox. Have never gone on xbox-live but love playing the retro games ala nes, snes, colecovision, atari, n64, apple ][, c64, et al. What's wrong with that?

Sounds like you need some anger management, it's only gaming.