Slashdot Mirror
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."
Or as people are calling it, the Dreamcast 360.
Under pressure to cut the enormous losses the Home Entertainment division has racked up over the past four years or so, MS was forced to kill off bleeding like mad xbox early in it's life and rush to get something out the door fast and cheap.
This is bad if you are a console developer. In the console market you look for a stable development environment and milk it for all it's worth. Having a manufacturer come right out and essentially kill off the platform early is not something developers look kindly on. It isn't something that will kill support for a console, but it will be a significant negative factor on future support plans for console manufacturer.
With the mandate to reduce losses and get something out there quickly to replace the EOLed xbox, MS wasn't left with many options. The x86 chips were out the running compared to PPC. Too weak, too hot, etc. Really all that was left is seeing what IBM could slap together quickly. And the result was the weak 360 cpu. Despite the fawning over the high clock speed, the three inorder cores will be clobbered by early next year's desktop chips. The large number of xbox owners who bought the first xbox because they wanted the most powerful system aren't going to want to downgrade to something so realtively weak compared to desktops and Sony's soon to be released PS3.
The final nail in the coffin for the 360 is that after four years MS really has no must have exclusives other than Halo. And MS has failed to acquire any new must have IP. In other words, if you didn't buy an xbox before there is going to be no reason to buy a new xbox.
MS is going to be lucky to hold on to half of their current xbox owners. MS has been in full scale PR push for the next xbox and they seem to have done more damage than if they had just kept their mouths shut. The damage just the MTV segment did is staggering.
In the end, all the talk about MS and their billions is no different than the last time they were about to launch a console.
In reality you have a bunch of mostly pc developers rushing to get product out the door for hardware that is marginally faster than today's desktop systems. Not a recipe for success in the console market.
Console wars are won and lost long before hardware hits retail shelves. Long before all the fans are still talking about 'launch strategies' and other such sillyness.