Xbox's biggest obstacle heading into next generation

[flagstaad]

I think they have 3 obstacles:

1. Lack of confidence because of RRoD, early adopter will think it twice (or maybe more times) because of the many issues that they had with the RRoD, and that can cause the early sales to be lackluster or be splitted with the competition.

2, Overshooting with the hardware, they can create a very advanced and expensive hadware that people will not be willing to purchase and if not in the development vicinity of the competiton the 3rd party developers will not take advantage of anyway

3, Balancing the casual and the hardcore, all seems to indicate that the next box will include Kinect 2.0 but how much of the developing effort will be expend on creating games or functionalities for it, instead of creating hardcore exclusives? They could sell very good numbers focusing on the casual crowd (they are legion) but they purchase very few titles and the backlash from the rest of the community can be harsh.

Worst case will be a combination of all 3 obstacles at the same time, option 2 is just a maybe and it will depend not only on Microsoft but also on the competition so there is nothing they can do about it, but the other 2 are real posibilities that they must face/discuss internally to avoid if they can.