Europe is key battleground, says Microsoft

[Lord N]

shams said:
People are seriously underestimating the 360 for next year. More solid (stable) revisions, cheaper prices, even more games, gamer choice games like Bioshock/Halo3/CoD, movies on demand, etc.

The new announcement/deal with Viacom is HUGE - it gives MS a huge supply of media/content.

I think 360 sales next year will be about 50% higher than this year - its primarily Sony fans who want the competition to vanish ASAP that don't agree (with no good reasoning).

In many ways, 2008 will be the year of the 360 - and 2009 will be the year of the PS3 (taking the Wii out of the equation anyway - pointless to compare to it for now).

 

I fail to see how the 360 is going to increase its sales by 50% next year when

1) It will still be above mass market price point even with a price cut

2) Its library will still mainly target the core gamer and the hardcore gamer.

 

Titles like Alan Wake, Too Human, Halo Wars, Fable 2, Banjo Kazooie, are not proven IPs/system sellers. They will probably end up selling well, but they'll sell to the userbase and not really move any hardware in the same way as Lost Planet, GRAW: 2, Forza 2, Madden 08, etc. Some of them could end up flopping outright.

The 360 had a price cut and the extremely-hyped launch of by far its most prominent titles(Halo 3), and it still will have only sold about eitht million units this year, so it's highly unlikely that it's going to see that kind of sales increase when it has nothing anywhere near as big as Halo, no exclusive proven IPs/system sellers, and will still be fairly expensive, especially for a console in its third year.