Phalanx on 08 August 2007
| dallas said: The sales cross-over, what does it mean? In short it means that the Wii will continue to do well, and will continue to attract a fat amount of 3rd party support. For the 360, its lower sales can't help at all. I think that the most likely candidate for any of the big 3 to do rather poorly this generation is in fact the 360 since it has shown little momentum lately in terms of sales, product enhancement, and to some degree it has been lacking with attracting 3rd party support to the favor of the PS3 more so than 5 or 6 months ago. The most recent announcement of the $50 price cut sounds like a worrysome signal, which tells me that while they are cutting the price $50, they just dont have the money right now ( with the enormous cost of refurbing) to bump the price cut up to $75 or $80, which was what they initially seemed to be thinking about if you guys remember the first reports of the 360s price cut. In fact, there have been calls from MS's shareholders to sell off the game making division, meaning that the shareholders think that at this point, the profitability of the 360 might not materialize for quite a while, perhaps until Q2 or Q3 2008. Keep in mind that the Falcon/added heatsink version of the 360 will not solve their refurb problems immediately. Because so many easily overheated 360s are on the market, they will have problems for quite a while. It may take until the end of 2008 for this not to be such an issue for MS, meanwhile Nintendo and Sony will be able to put their earnings towards more useful ventures, ie more game development, product development (home, BD, DVR etc) or a pricecut ( more likely for the PS3 than the Wii because of the wii's upstart success. So, in terms of hardware, the 360 won't have a lot of forward momentum, as it just won't have enough tools and budgetable resources to compete with the Wii/PS3. Software sales should remain very good for the 360, as well as its online sales. On a sidenote, this whole game thing for MS seems pretty unusual for me. Microsoft has traditionally been a software company, that is what they are good at, that is what they know best. Console gaming is a lot more than just taking care of your software, as they are painfully finding out with the feared RROD problem. I think that MS should make this generation its last foray into console gaming and instead possibly get into the software side of gaming more than it has been. MS is overall a very good company, with the size to dominate whatever it gets into, but this whole console gaming thing has been the clumsiest performance that I could possibly see. |
Zune says hi.
