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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...
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.
3DO sold more than Xbox in Japan.
10 million Xbox2 by the end of year? No problem!
Start paying all employees in Xbox2s instead of money...
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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