Shocking?
The Xbox 360 is set to sell ~12 Million consoles this year. Now im saying theres a good chance it will better it by 33%. The best indication for future sales trends are the most recent trends. Those trends show the Xbox 360 to be up by a little over 50% over the last 10 weeks when compared to the previous year.
The Xbox 360 has finally found its feet in Europe and the YOY sales indicate that most of the gains from the last 10 weeks YOY were from that region. To be honest for most of the year it was generally acknowledged that Xbox 360 sales were terrible, especially in Europe. The big price cuts didn't effect most of last years sales at all, they came too late for that. So for that reason one cannot just look at early Q1 results from last year and say that the Xbox 360 will follow that trend.
The momentum from this year will carry forward to the next, I cannot think of a single reason why the Xbox 360 sales next year will not follow a similar trend to the last weeks of this year barring an industry wide collapse of sales. The system has only been at a mass market price for a matter of weeks and the price cut of $80 to the Arcade unit is a significant reduction and it has reached a very important psycological milestone.
Microsoft is playing the game well
Price alone isn't going to justify much higher sales, Microsoft has done well to make the console relevant to a much wider demographic of people. The wide range of games they have released is a testament to this, and it goes much further than that. The partnership with Netflix in the United States is an extremely sound move that caters to a generation of people who are used to the instant access afforded by the internet. These people are their key demographic, the generation where fewer than 50% of Teenagers actually bought a physical CD in the previous year. If you consider that next year people will have an opportunity to participate in live game shows, they could strike another home-run with another significant group of people.
Lastly
At this point, the games only matter if you don't have them. Theres no one conventional game which is set to move a massive quantity of consoles on its own. Its a general quality of entertainment which is continuing to move consoles, the hardcore gamers pretty much all have consoles if they're going to buy them already. We should see quite an impressive increase in YOY sales comparing this years early quarters to next. The good work has already been done, and pretty much next year is time to see the rewards for that effort.
All they need is a slight increase in sales for the last 10 weeks of the year and theres nothing that indicates an unwillingness or inability to cut the price again at the end of next year. The main difference will come from the weekly sales for the first 3 quarters of the year, and between generally terrible sales for those quarters this year compared to the likely sales for next year, sales should be up for that period significantly.
Tease.
