The 360's Position in the Next-Gen War

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a great article on the Elite Bastards site looking at the Xbox 360's positioning in the next-gen market. In the first of a three part article series, the author looks at the lessons Microsoft learned from its first hardware outing, and what he feels the company's strategy will be in the near future. From the article: "Clearly my impression of the Xbox 360 is that it is positioned to compete significantly better in the next gen console race than its predecessor. The difference this time around is that although Microsoft will no longer have the decidedly most powerful console, they also won't have the most expensive console, and believe me, they will compete on price. The Xbox 360s media (DVD) and input device (gamepad) are safe choices and the CPU may be merely adequate, but the GPU is quite potent and should go far in keeping Microsoft's box in the same league as Sony's overall despite the disparity in time to market."

Comments

My Take

[American AC in Paris]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the XBox 360 is in for a rough future.

The Launch: Microsoft did a decent job hyping the system, but the launch was, on balance, weak. You had your brief hysteria of $5,000 systems on eBay, but it died down fairly quickly. You had serious supply issues--to the point where it hurt more than helped. You had the whole power supply issue. You had decent games, but no "killer title" that made you want to go out and get it.

Today: The games are still pretty pedestrian--the operative word is "prettier", which will only get you so far. Now that the insanity of the launch period has passed, there isn't much about the XBox 360 that appeals to the average consumer--it's expensive, it has decent games but nothing "must-have", and finally, it's expensive. $350 for the system and $50-60 games is simply too expensive for the casual gamer.

Tomorrow: As Thanksgiving approaches, I'm willing to bet that the 360 hits hard times. Unless they can come up with a bigger hit than Halo, all the chatter is going to be about the Revolution. Nintendo is going to have the luxury of not needing killer games at launch; the new user interface alone will likely drive sales, and if they can put out a few decent games that take advantage of this, they'll be set.

Basically, to your average consumer, there's little reason to get an XBox 360 right now. It's a big enough investment that most people won't consider it as an impulse buy, and it's enough like the last generation of consoles that it won't generate enough interest--again, this is unless they can get a truly must-have game out before, say, September.

The 360's position in the next-gen war is that of the gung-ho kid who vaults out of the trench and bursts ahead of the rest of the charge: he's out front right now and will bask in glory if he can survive--but he's also the first target to come in range.

Or, from another angle: Sony and Microsoft are working hard to field the finest cavalry regiments ever seen on a field of battle. Nintendo is working hard on building a tank.

Re:My Take

[archen]

Not just girls but everyone who isn't your conventional "gamer" demographic. The PS2 seems to have attained the widest audience just because it managed to be sitting as the fat cat at the top the longest and has the largest library. The Xbox seems to be targeting college age males extensively. Then MS seems to go after the same target audience again with the 360. I doubt Sony really has much of a comprehensive plan on a target market aside from throw out as much hype as possible and try to dazzle everyone you can.

Sony and MS seem to be missing the really big picture here, and that's that there is a HUGE untapped market that's going to be emergeing - everyone ELSE. My wife likes to play various games, but is quite dismayed at the fact that very very little seems to appeal to females at all. When you're talking about kids, family-oriented stuff, WOMEN, and possibly other segmants not considered - that adds up to a huge potential MS has already over-looked, and Sony will probably gloss over as well.

So far, going no better in Japan

[ChrisRijk]

Xbox 360 is going nowhere fast in Japan. Worse than original Xbox actually. Latest weekly sales available (*) show just 1288 units being sold (estimated) - even the Game Cube is still selling more. Of course, there's still the rest of the world, but one of Microsoft's objectives with Xbox 360 was to succeed in Japan. Looks to be a distant dream right now.

(*) See bottom of: http://www.m-create.com/jpn/s_ranking.html