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.

Comments

Smaller library

[Generic Guy]

...having a bigger game library than the Nintendo Wii.

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.

Re:Smaller library

[grumbel]

### There's lots compatibile including virtually all the AAA titles.

Isn't that part of the problem? Its nice to have support for AAA titels, but most people already have played them over and over again and there is a good chance that those AAA titles will get a successor sooner or later anyway, so at least for me I don't really consider AAA titles that important, at least not really more important then the rest and looking at that list Yager, Shenmue, Panzer Dragon, Psychonauts, BrokenSword, Fahrenheit, Advent Rising, Riddik, X-Men Legends 1 and 2, TimeSplitters2 and 3 all not listed, all quite good games, all games I own. So while the backward compability might be better then nothing, it is *FAR* away from being an XBox1 replacemet, since the fraction of games that work is still quite small compared to those games that are on the market.

What makes things even worse is that Microsoft doesn't have offer any way to bundle XBox360 binaries with newly released XBox1 games, meaning even when a new XBox1 game is released there is nothing the developers can do to get XBox360 compability out of the box, it all depends on Microsoft to provide a patch or maybe not depending on the gamers luck. The transition from XBox to XBox360 is really far from optimal and I have some doubts that it will ever get much better before the XBox1 finally fades away completly.