There have been repeated links from various places stating that the 360 was now profitable on each console... With the CPU and GPU die shrinks, they have most certainly reduced costs and I'm sure they will further do so. Yeah, Halo 3 brought in some big bucks, but holiday software sales on the 360 are going to be a major boost. Lots of consoles sold, TONS of software sold, plus having RROD charges in the rearview mirror leads me to believe MS is going to have a VERY profitable quarter over the holidays and will most likely stay in the black until their next console unless there is another round of price wars.
Also... Anyone care to take a stab at what Microsoft's next quarter earnings will look like -- specifically for gaming? They made something like $150M Q1 2008 (July Aug September) with a huge initial shipment of Halo 3 to retailers but this quarter will see sustained hardware sales increases as well as a holiday of great software sales? Possibly double that number? Maybe $300 to $350 million? Q2 2008 will be Oct/Nov/Dec 2007 timeframe and I am thinking it will be will be quite stellar indeed.
From VGC's monthly US totals for Q1 2008, the Xbox 360 sold approxmately 10,431,000 units of software. For Q2, 2008, we have October at 4.023 million and November to date at 7.972 million units. That leaves us with December. I would guess that number will increase rather significantly again, but not double again as it did from Oct-Nov. Last year the pattern was roughly a double from Oct-Nov and then about 50% again from Nov-December... That would give me an estimate of about 12 million units of software for December or a total for the Quarter of about $24 million units in total. That's a lot of software. My guesstimate is that they will also sell about 2.5 million consoles in Q2 vs. about 1.1 million in Q1 2008... Yes, this is America only but I suspect Europe will roughly follow the same growth pattern and Japan is too small to change the trend significantly.
I hate trolls.
Systems I currently own: 360, PS3, Wii, DS Lite (2)
Systems I've owned: PS2, PS1, Dreamcast, Saturn, 3DO, Genesis, Gamecube, N64, SNES, NES, GBA, GB, C64, Amiga, Atari 2600 and 5200, Sega Game Gear, Vectrex, Intellivision, Pong. Yes, Pong.
