By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
thismeintiel on 07 May 2017
Edit Thread
Ka-pi96 said:
thismeintiel said:

The beginning of the 360 was not great.  Sure, they tried harder in Japan, but it didn't work.  And not only did you have some horribly rushed HW that lead to RROD, but the 360 did less than 8M in its first 2 years on the market.  The Mattrick era oversaw the revision on HW to fix RROD and the release of the 3 tier 360 model that led it to sell 11M in 2008.  It also sold on par with the first 2 years in just 2007, when he took over.  And while I dislike the Kinect, you can not ignore that it lead to increased interest and sales in the 360.  Basically, the beginning of the 360 era was fucked up.  The middle was good.  And then the ending sucked, too, since MS was focusing more on getting ready for the XBO and far less exclusives were launching.

Of course, just like with the XBO launch, Mattrick was only one spoke on the wheel that really helped and then hurt the Xbox brand.  Ballmer was ultimately in charge.  Spencer played his part in all of that, too.  He wasn't exactly the mail guy when all of this went down.  As someone said in another thread, Spencer just seems like a yes man who is just better at PR than Mattrick.  Mattrick just became the scapegoat to easily push aside the bad policies, as if he was the only one at MS who liked them and OKed them.

Didn't it? Their sales in Japan trebled from one gen to the next, and that was after giving up part way through. If you're trebling your sales you're definitely doing something right! And if they hadn't given up on it that increase certainly would have been even greater!

And no, 360 didn't sell less than 8m in its first 2 years. It did that in about 13 months. Just over 1 months worth of sales in 2005 =/= a year. mattrick took over in July of 2007 so it's unlikely anything he did actually affected 2007 sales. And as I mentioned before the majority (probably all) of the games it got in 2008 would almost certainly have been agreed before he took charge as well. The 2008 remodel releasing barely a year after he took over too means it was probably in the pipeline beforehand as well. Just think about how long they've been working on the Scorpio redeisgn...

And hey, the beginning of the Xbox 360 only sucked for the people who had their houses burned down by it. That was pretty rare though...

Well, I guess it did help some.  But, how much of that was the exclusives on 360 and how much was that because the PS3 was $200 more expensive than the 360?  In the end, stopping the Japanese support was most likely a cost benefit analysis.  It cost them much more to make those games than they were getting back in sales.

When I say 2 years, I mean calender years, not an actual two year period.  Still, if you do the full years, the 360 sold 13.7M, where the PS3 sold 16.6M.  Either way, it's not great. You also can't take everything away from him by using the pipeline argument.  There were a lot of games in the pipeline before Spencer took charge, yet I'm sure we don't take that away from him.  Hell, Spencer probably isn't responsible for much, in terms of games, except maybe cancelling them.

And it sucked because for a year and a half, MS denied any HW issues with the 360.  They claimed it was a very small problem that was due to user error.  Same goes for it scratching discs due to MS buying cheap drives that had little to no stabilization.  Even slight vibrations could cause it to scratch them.  So, that's over a year that people had to buy new systems and games because MS lied about the issue.