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Microsoft Says No New Xbox 360s In 2009
OrochimaruVoldemort writes "Microsoft has said to Engadget that they do not plan on making new consoles available in 2009. This comes from the same company that said it wasn't producing a Blu-ray drive for that Xbox, so it is pure speculation. Expect to see a new console within that year. Engadget also hints: 'Microsoft representative let us know today that "While we don't normally comment on rumors like this, we can tell you that we have no plans to release a new console in 2009."' The rest of us will wait and see. For now, focus on what is available."
If they said they did it would hurt sales of the current revision. Now if Nintendo or Sony were going to release a Wii2 or PS4 in the next year you'd have the standard MS vaporware announcement while they scramble to actually put a product together.
I read the title to mean that MS would stop making 360s.
What the article said is that there isn't going to be a slim version of the 360 or a 360 with a Blu-Ray drive.
Quite a big difference, I think.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
See, the sad thing is PC gaming isn't King, even if its better. Consoles make 2-3x as much as PC gaming does at least. There's no contest anymore. The King was crowed long ago.
I hate to say this, but MMO games and the continuing subscription model limited only by server and bandwidth costs make PCs king of the profit field.
I hate to say it because I think all of the MMO games currently available are roughly comparable to being consumed by and subsequently shit out of a bear.
Eventually some visionary developer is going to get it right, though... and they're going to end up richer than God.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
I think you guessed poorly. As someone in retail electronics, the vast majority of people have no idea what resolution means. Couple that with the higher and higher demands on performance PC hardware, and its an expensive proposition. Joe Majority is not going back to PC gaming, ever. And the majority is all that really matters here.
'We don't want to say, "We're releasing a better version next year." and then have people refuse to buy the old units like they did with the HDMI thing. Especially as it would be for a full twelve months this time. That would really kill our lead against the other consoles in North America. So, uh, "We've got no plans!"'
It's almost certainly a lie. But they would be crazy to tell the truth and destroy their market until the new models did finally ship.
It's pretty much guaranteed Sony will ship new models too. Bigger hard drives, cooler processors, smaller cases, new skus with games bundled. There are always new stimuli to keep the market active. But no one in their right mind acknowledges their roadmap for the next 20 months (to the end of '09), screwing their current market with all the people who figure they'll just wait.
It's not just consoles. Canon releases a new xxxD camera every year or so, a new xxD camera every 18 months, pretty much like clockwork. And yet they refuse to announce the new model until the last possible moment, denying everything they can, so as not to trash the current prices. Look at what happened to the $3,000 Canon 5D that everyone assumed would have got a new revision in February. Even without a new rev turning up, discounting got so competetive on the assumption the old model was about to become obsolete that it now goes for a hair over $2,000. Even then, people like myself who'd still get a lot from the 5D are putting off their purchase, waiting for whatever its successor turns out to be or much lower 5D prices, rather than letting Canon shift stock now.
Consoles, in aggregate, generate more game software sales revenue from traditional brick and mortar retail outlets than the PC. Its a bit more difficult to sort out the hardware side. NVIDIA posted a record quarter for its first quarter this year (at $1.15 billion) but that's from a variety of sources and only one of the big two name sin gaming. There is no good way to filter out PC gaming hardware vs non-gaming hardware outside of video cards so we won't try and split up the more than $100 billion a year PC system sales to compare it to the $8 billion or so in console hardware sales.
Sticking with software for a moment; if you compare US PC retail software sales vs US console software sales the PC came in third behind the PS2 and XBOX 360 last year with $900 million from brick and mortar stores (ignoring that NPD collects data from only 60-80% of the market and extrapolates the remainder). If you add back in subscription sales the PC was actually the top (non-portable) platform last year with over $2 billion in software and subscription sales. And if you accept recent evidence that digital sales have reached parity/exceeded brick and mortar sales then the PC is in the neighborhood of $3 billion in software derived revenue per year, or in the same ballpark as the top three console platforms combined.
Of course, all of that is a lot of silly wang measuring using NPD numbers. Which really amounts to comparing one wildly inaccurate (or at the very least, incomplete) set of numbers to another. The frustrating thing is that while NPD uses a lot of hand waving when describing their data collection methods and releases very selective sub-sets of data to the public (remember, their business model revolves around selling the detailed stuff); our illustrious media accepts these numbers as immutable, indisputable, fact. They then turn around and ignore that the $18.5 billion figure includes hardware, software, and accessories sales for nine platforms (PS2, XBOX, XBOX 360, PS3, DS, Game Boy Advanced, and PSP) plus partial software sales from a tenth (the PC) and proclaim that video games outsell theatrical movies tickets by almost two to one. The general public in turn parrots this line ('cause the news is always right) and console fans trumpet the 17 to 1 ratio vs retail PC software sales as proof that the PC industry is essentially dead.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
I think you've got this entirely backwards. It's PC gaming that's in trouble, not the consoles. Average people have little to no interest in constantly upgrading their PCs just so the newest game will run, worrying about driver problems, patches, the current rash of DRM on PC games, etc. With an Xbox360 or PS3, they just come home with the game, put the disc in, and it starts. They didn't even have to look on the back of the box before they bought it to see if they needed to spend $200 on a new video card first. The reason it takes games like Assassin's Creed so long to come out for PC is because the PC version is almost an afterthought now, it's hardly even considered a major platform. Grand Theft Auto IV is probably the "biggest" game of the year, and last I saw it didn't even have a PC version planned. If you're a PC-exclusive gamer now, you're going to get left behind on a lot of the big games, and I only see this trend continuing in the future.
Sturgeon was an optimist.