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Microsoft Aims For 15 Million 360s By Next Year
Gamespot is carrying the news that Microsoft is aiming to sell 13 to 15 Million consoles by June of next year. The story shows good and bad news for the company; While they've already sold 5 Million units, the Home Entertainment division lost about $1.2 billion for the last year. From the article: "Will Microsoft make its goal in the face of not one, but two rival next-gen console launches this fall? That remains to be determined, but the console will have the advantage of being cheaper than the Sony PlayStation 3 and having a bigger game library than the Nintendo Wii. The upcoming 12 months will also see several exclusive 'system seller' titles be released for the 360, including Epic Games' Gears of War, which is tentatively due this holiday season." Kotaku points out that, to sweeten the pot, a new bundle pack may be in the offing for the system.
I thought that the XBox division lose a billion dollars every year, and always have? I'm sure I remember reading that last year. They've just had to write off a load of R&D money for the 360, we know they aren't making any profit on the physical hardware, and the sales figures for the original XBox have totally nosedived, so it's hardly surprising.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I think they can hit that mark easily. 15 million units produced should be no problem in that timeframe.
Oh, sold? Well, that could be more of a problem.
Microsoft PR are just hope the "10 Million people aim to buy at least one 360s By Next Year" appears soon.
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
Let's be realistic here. The Wii will have Gamecube backwards compatibility, as well as the reported classic system emulations giving it a large library right from the get go. I'm sure the PS3 will also have a decent level of backwards compatibility as well. Backwards compatibility for the Xbox360 has been extremely hit-and-miss -- Dubious at best, certainly over-hyped, which forces Microsoft to rely on building new expensive titles for their new system. I predict their 15 million units prediction is also over-hyped.
{ - Generic Guy - }
15 Milion Units ... Nicely stacked in warehouses just right besides the fairy tales.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
A press conference to be held sometime in the near future reveals Microsoft's new ad campaign for the XBox360 is based solely on a price comparison to the PS3 in hopes that bang-for-the-buck consumers will be swayed by "premium console" with the harddrive, wireless controller and HD capabilities AND a game or two (perhaps featuring EA's all time favorite Car or Football Guy!) for $600, vs a PS3 with some kind of motion sensitive dual shock without the shock. Admittedly, Microsoft states the ad campaign makes them look 'kinda like an ass' but, they retort, "asking $600 for just the console would make us an ass too'.
just poking fun. Buy whatever you want. Your hard earned money, not mine.
1. Make less suck.
:-)
Taking 300W, putting out enough heat to warm a house during a Siberian winter and catching on fire is not the first way to win over customers.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I bet they can do it. Why? Simple. People that have a PS2, GC, or regular XBox right now want to see the entire playing field before they move to the next level. It has been impossible to tell what system will be the best, until all systems are available.
(Might be harder knowing that most people will have already ruled out the PS3 due to the rediculous price tag)
Well, with numbers like that victory is assured to the brave and noble 360 over the vile and shifty PS3! Onward to Victory!!
Time to use that "zonked" tag again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The 360 has sold only 3 million and change after 7 months. And that is against nothing but a six and five year old console. One of which has almost no new games coming out for it. We all know the 360 is dead in Japan, but the bad news few people have picked up on yet is the 360 appears to have essentially died in Europe. From the latest Microsoft numbers, they only shipped 200k new consoles last quarter to Europe. That means that the 360 is basically living off of the US market.
15 million? The 360 will have a hard time making it 5 million sold by the end of the year.
One just has to read Microsoft employee frequented sites to see just how wildly unpopular the 360 is up in Redmond. I would be surprised if the 360 survives to this time next year with such outright and open hostility towards the project.
I was at a job interview with M$ a month ago, and when I implied I knew about the rumours of the handheld game unit they are developing, I got a response of a tight-lipped face looking at me saying "That's all I'm going to say about it". When you saw the interviewer's face, you knew that they knew there was more to the story... I was absolutely convinced that there is a handheld unit in development. We'll see how it ties into the 15 million XBox 360s M$ plans to sell.
Home Entertainment division lost about $1.2 billion for the last year.
They're on track to lose $4+ billion for this generation console. That's their goal right?! Just like the last one?!
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
Oh, I thought they were aiming to shoot them, so that they wouldn't lose so much money on each console sold.
The question to me is: Will they be playing catchup the moment a BluRay PS3 is available? How much are high-def, high capacity drives worth?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Nintendo announced today that sales of its hand-held, dual-screened video game player, the Nintendo DS, have topped 20 million worldwide (guesstimates say 21,270,000). Nintendo expects DS (Lite) sales to be 17 million between April 2006 and March 2007.
Sony has managed to do two things: create an extremely expensive and lackluster product that is overhyped and piss off a lot of people to the point that they root for Microsoft. Yes, root for Microsoft! When was the last time that a company so badly screwed its customers that somebody wished that Microsoft would take them down hard?
So exactly how they plan on selling them, with no worthy software?
Or in other words, why should I - already having a top-end gaming PC - buy one? Which games does it offer that I can't play otherwise, and that are worth the ridiculously high prices (70e+ in some parts of europe)
Gears of War has some potential, but so far its a shiny graphics demo. Nothing launched exclusively so far has had any real meat to it. X360 is missing it's 'Halo' to sell it, unlike the original Xbox at launch, and most announced shiny thingys at E3 are multiplatform, with versions also for PC and/or PS3. As long as PS3 has some major exclusives (Metal Gear series and Gran Turismo series alone will sell fuckton of overpriced PS3s), and Xbox 360 has only shinyed-up ports and crap, it won't sell.
Consoles live and die by their _exclusive_ triple-A titles. Microsoft seems to have forgotten this one...
Aim Lower.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Instead of spending 600$ on a new console and maybe two games, I dropped half that on a new video card and an Xbox360 controller for my PC. Now I can play the same exact (decent) games, with the same exact controls, on a machine that doesn't overheat. Best decision ever.
The wired 360 controller is just another USB HID device; as soon as I plugged it in, XP was like 'Hey! You've got a controller. Let me check windowsupdate for the driver! Hey! Even better! It's an Xbox360 controller! Here's the driver. Dot dot dot. Enjoy!' And off I went.
Informatus Technologicus
15 million by next simply isn't happening for Microsoft and the 360. It just isn't possible.
If one looks at the breakdown of 360 sales for the first seven months:
Japan: 140k units - Microsoft is effectively dead in this market. Obviously.
Europe: Sales are in the 700-800k range with sales having slowed to a trickle over the past couple of months.
US: Sales are behind the first Xbox by about 200 to 300k at the same point in the Xbox's life.
So the 360 is pretty much selling in just one territory and tracking the first Xbox sales at a reduced percentage with no other next gen console on the market to compete with. Perhaps a 100 dollar price drop and getting rid of the ridiculous 50 dollar a year online charge will help get the 360 up to Xbox level sales in the US, but with the console dead in one territory and dying in another, there simply is no way that the 360 is going to sell 11 to 12 million consoles in the US by next year or that 360 sales in Japan and Europe will magically pickup.
Microsoft and the 360 are looking at a best case scenario of probably 5 to 6 million worldwide by this time next year. With some 3 to 3.5 million sold so far, adding only 200-250k every month in the US is not going make a viable platform for developers when the Wii and PS3 arrive on the scene in a few months.
I want a half decent sized library in 12 months before I plop down the cash for a new 360, a mod chip, and new 500gb hd.
But still, the fact remains that this handheld that is just a stopgap between the GBA and whatever will come next is outselling everyone else. While only a handfull of games appeal to me it might be true that Nintendo has tapped that mythic casual gamer pool. Yes it is a sad day for us fans of Planescape torment, Scumm and System Shock fans when Nintendogz sells 6 million units but the sign was on the wall ever since The Sims became a record breaker.
It can't be a coincedence that the Gameboy line is the only computer to come in pink. I blame women for the death of the old Sierra and Lucasarts and the demise of Looking Glass.
Do NOT let them WIN! Buy your 360 and it endless horde of mindless FPSes today and make a stand against the pink DS owners. No to social gaming and up with testosterone. It is fragged or be hugged. Buy a copy of DOA beachball today and let the other half of the world know what gaming is all about.
Not that they don't know. Anyone ever notice how all the erotic mods for Morrowind/Oblivion and Never Winter Nights are often made by women? Who would have thought it, the weaker sex is even more obsessed with it then we are. Makes sense, we got to stop to scratch, they can keep thinking of it 24/7
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As for the PS3, it's major downsides for me are size and price, both of which are oddly close to a compact car.
Oddly I find the 360 better fitting that description, emitting heat like a radiator and only costing $100 less than the PS3 with somewhat better specs. None of the titles you mention are that a great a draw to me to buy a console for (and I have played all of them except for Prey).
I generally agree with your points on PC gaming, except that I still prefer FPS games on a PC over a console... and RTS games are a lot more deep on the PC. Other than that though I have totally switched to consoles as my primary gaming platform.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You shouldn't. You're clearly not a console gamer, which also means you're not part of the target market.
Plenty of people who own gaming PC's also own consoles.
The complaint is that if you have a PC, there is nothing on the 360 that is different enough or that you cannot get on the PC already.
Lots of people with PC's bought PS2's and XBoxes, because they had games that you could not get for the PC nor would you want to really play on the PC. Where are THOSE games?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Except that the "core" PS3 won't be missing a hard drive. Aside from prettier graphics from the HDMI output, both PS3's will play the same games.
I fear you have little experience in retail. Most large retailers (*cough*Wal-Mart*cough*) require the ability to return unsold stock to you and get their money back. Technically, even though the retailer may have bought the units, and have them sitting on shelves in stores, you cannot book it as sales revenue without also booking the RMA liability dollars (though some accountants are well paid for finding ways of doing so anyhow). Anyway, shipped is a long way from sold.
Also, most large retailers have corporate buyers with certain authority what to buy, etc. as well as local buyers with some authority to buy and stock items particular to that given store. It is not at all unheard of, however unfortunate it might seem, that a corporate buyer is buying on a contract, purchase X number of units of some widget, sends a percentage of them to each store, even though some stores have pallets of them sitting in the back wasting space. That's when those "pre-authorized" RMAs start coming in handy.
It is also common to have store FOO returning product while store BAR is buying more even though it is often less expensive to simply stock transfer products from FOO to BAR. A lot of it depends on the corporate structure and culture, the accounting setup, operating procedures, etc., and all that other corporate crap. I've seen managers of various levels refuse to ship stock from their store to another, even though they don't need it, the other store does, and there is nothing technically forbidding them from doing so...due to departmental and budgetary boundary lines (ie., some corporate structures, while looking good on paper, tend to create fiefdoms, enhance corporate politics, and all that jazz). Just remember: retailers aren't all perfectly oiled machines or even that adeptly managed. Just like anything else where people are involved. Nobody's perfect and it shows up more when there's less nobody around, if you catch my drift.
Well, good luck with that.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 sure looks nice, though....
Premium 360 = $399
Premium PS3 = $599
599 - 399 = 200
1. It's only $100 cheaper than the PS3 out of the box. No one here is buying the "core" system, are they?
It is remarkably difficult to accurately determine why people are not buying a product, thus you will not find any studies on "why people are not buying the XBox 360". In real life I have had several discussions with XBox owners who have yet to buy an XBox 360 and (in general) they claim that "The XBox 360 is too expensive to buy on a whim; if the XBox 360 had more interesting games, or was cheaper, I would probably buy it." Now, you can't generalize my experience to all of North America (nor can you generalize it across platforms) but if I am correct and the price is a major detractor than the PS3 may be in for a beating.
I know what you're thinking, it's only $500 who can't afford it?
When you consider Taxes, Mortgage/Rent, Car Payments, Insurance, Energy expenses and utilities, Food, Clothing, and Misc expenses (expected and unexpected) very few people end up having much (if any) money left over for a luxury item like a videogame console. If you start considering the average debt load of most people in North America, the likely situation of property values decreasing in the near future(meaning it will be difficult to consolidate your debts), the fact that inflation is outpacing wage increases, and that interest rates may continue to rise it becomes clear that most people are going to have to be far more careful with their money over the next few years; meaning un-necessary items will not be purchased.
All I'm saying is that people are going to be in a situation where they are going to want to save that $100-$200 (depending on price drop) by buying a XBox 360 rather than the PS3, or will buy the dramatically less expensive Wii, or (more likely) will purchase nothing at all. The fact that the XBox 360 is selling so poorly is actually a very bad sign for the PS3.
Many people don't need the 60GB hard drive, HDMI out, built-in WiFi, etc.
Well, the obvious solution to the problem is for Microsoft to produce even more FPS games.
After all, if noone's buying a platform known for its sports games and FPS games, then obviously they need to make more FPS games.
Oh, and more sports games too. You can never have enough lame golf games!
[caveat - I'm getting a Wii, my last game console was an xBox]
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Booo hooo hooo-hooo hooo!
From the article at Semiconductor Fabtech:
The 360 has been out for 8 months, and has only sold 5 million units total in all markets. That includes the markets they've started selling in that neither Sony nor Nintendo have ever significantly broached before. Now they're saying that in the next 12 months, they expect to sell double what they've sold so far, this time with competition from 2 competitors. It clearly explains what their disadvantages are and what their advantages are in this competition. I'm willing to accept your hypothesis that Zonk is biased in his console preference, but your proof is sorely lacking.
just some guy
How long will it take Nintendo to sell 15 million Wiis? Wiii? Wiiae?
This is a very good point, one most people haven't even thought of. They all assume the 360 isn't selling because of lack of games, or because people are waiting for a PS3/Wii. The fact that the 360 is still 400 freaking dollars is the reason I haven't gotten one yet, either. I can justify spending ridiculous amounts of money on a new pc, cause I can use it for more than just video games. I can't justify $400 for a new games console, especially one where all but one of the games I want can be purchased for the pc.
just some guy
I agree the article itself is pretty reasonable.
However you'll note the title of this story is not "Microsoft continues to lose money on 360". It is mentioned, but as aside - along of course with a positive story about how the 360 is going to see a PGR bundle (ironically at the same price as the base PS3).
Basically the story summary was all about plucking the most positive aspects from the article possible, mentioning the one unavoidable fact to deflect potential criticism of the story, and then adding in a positive fluff piece to counter any possible negativity to the 360 image that might result.
My annoyance (and sarcastic commentary) is more aimed at blatant editorial bias than with the linked content (in this instance).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have no bias; I like the 360 (though I do not own one). I just find the consistant message Zonk is sending to be unprofessional. Alone the story would mean nothing but there is a clear trend evident - look through the comments, I am not the only one to think so. Look through past stories and see the same.
That is why I attempt to get people to tag stories with indications of bias with the "zonked" tag. If enough people do so, it lays bare the trend for all to see (if they ever allow tag searches). In theory it may even improve the Games section of Slashdot. Is there anything wrong with wanting a place you spend a lot of time reading to be as accurate and informative as possible?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I missed the price listing for the premium system above also being the same, sounds correct. That would be a pretty good bundle as PGR was kind of fun (I thought), and had some good online support (still an obvious advantage of the 360 until we see the PS3 service promised).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OTOH, I think it's funny for (some of) the PS3 and Nintendo advocates to complain that 360 has had a head start (# of games, quality thereof). Of course they do. That's what happens when you release first. Of course that's a double-edged sword, in that Nintendo and Sony got to see exactly what MS went to market with, and now have had a year to make their offering all the better.
All's fair in the console wars.
When XBMC runs on it, oh it doesnt? Well no money for M$ then.
You know it's a shame that I have to sift through so much knee-jerk MS hate on this site to get the good stuff that is on here.
Why is it worth your time to slam the 360. The truth is that you don't really know what the true sales figures are any more than the people who are claiming the 5 million sold. Actually, I think the number has more credibility because MS has lowered the number in the past when they have been unable to make their goals.
If you aren't aware of the 360 exclusives slated for this year then you are not informed enough to have an intelligent opinion on 360 offerings either pro or con. If you want to say those are just slated and are vaporware until they are released, that is fine as long as you are willing to apply that same standard to PC, PS3, and Wii. Personally I find it odd to say that because I can't buy it yet it doesn't exist, but if that's what you believe then fine. I will say that the gameplay that was shown for most of the 360 games released to date has pretty much matched what has been actually delivered.
I hate to disappoint you all, but MS will not lose money overall on the 360. They will even make money on the hardware eventually. They have not made the same mistakes that they did with the Xbox that prevented them from cutting costs as the console aged.
I guess just go on hating. You all are the ones that are losing out on a pretty darn good gaming experience. I will continue to be amazed/amused at the need of supposedly intelligent techies to make themselves feel better by hating all things MS.
It's NORMAL that they are losing money at this stage. No one should ever find a loss of money as a sign of failure this early on.
The 360s are sold at a loss. A bit of the money paid for the 360 is actually paid by Microsoft.
So for every 360 sold, MS lose a bit of money. That and the fact that a system launch cost money. The R&D has cost money.
So is NORMAL that their xbox division is losing money this year. They expect to make money back through Live and game sales. So let's wait until we have more games and that people have time to buy more than a couple of games before saying that "OMG, 360 is in trouble".
The PS3 is already in the red since it cost Sony tons of money and it didn't sell even ONE console. Should we all say Sony is in trouble since the PS3 doesn't provide ANY revenue and is putting Sony in the red?
Argument looks dumb, but it's the same as this number of 360 sold VS loss of profits "analysis".
A lot of people - myself included - figure it's not worth getting an Xbox360 or PS3 unless I have a good high definition TV to go along with it.
So instead of contemplating a move from a game console that cost $200 new to one that costs $400 (360 premium) or $600 (PS3 premium) new, I'm effectively looking at spending that plus another $400 or more on a reasonably cheap 26" HDTV. I'm sure a lot of enthusiasts would be looking for a 36" plasma set or something similar.
I could budget $800 or $1000 plus the price of some new games. But even though I can afford it, I don't spend two weeks' worth of net pay at the drop of a hat. It will easily be another year or two before I decide between a PS3 or Xbox360.
Spend another four billion dollars and buy them by yourself. Give me one and I will buy two costy games to make you happy so you can start to do a XBox 720 or XBox 361
Without HD it's just like any other games console. Looks fine.
In fact the move to HD is not that important, TV has looked photorealistic at SD resolutions for years. Things look great in HD sure, but the Xbox can't really take advantage of it since it supports SD too, ie, you can't use smaller text as SD won't show it legibily.
The biggest issue IMO is the price, but after I'd played my mate's I knew I wanted one. The Live features are innovative and fun.