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.

Only 3 Million Sold After 7 Months

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Isn't that par for the course?

[Swanktastic]

Look at the source for the bundle article:

A Toys R Us Canada employee

Canadian jokes aside, I'm somewhat skeptical.

Veering OT

[killmenow]

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.