Microsoft Aims For 15 Million 360s By Next Year 147
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.
Smaller library (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I bet they can... (Score:2, Insightful)
(Might be harder knowing that most people will have already ruled out the PS3 due to the rediculous price tag)
Re:um ... okay (Score:3, Insightful)
No worthy software (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:No problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Shipped = Sold
Riiiiight.
Ask Microsoft how many units they shipped to Japan. And guess how many units have SOLD in japan. Nice try.
Re:Smaller library (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No problem (Score:1, Insightful)
It is a pretty good indication of just how bad a console is doing in the market if one of its fanboys is furiously making the old "Shipped = Sold" rationalization.
Sorry fanboy, Japan, Europe, and the US all have reliable console hardware sales tracking firms that every console developers has relied on for a very long time.
The 360 is sitting just barely above three million consoles sold - with a little more than a million and a half consoles in the process of being shipped to retailers(US) or sitting on store shelves(Japan and Europe).
Re:Smaller library (Score:3, Insightful)
You can turn that around too:
"But the [XBOX360] will have the disadvantage of being more expensive than the Nintendo Wii and having a smaller game library than the Sony PlayStation 3."
Obvious Solution to Only 3 Million Sold (Score:2, Insightful)
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]
Issue is spin in summary (Score:3, Insightful)
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).