Microsoft's Xbox One Is Selling So Poorly Retailers Are Getting Desperate

[NightDragon83]

AndreRichards said:

NightDragon83 said:

Umm, the whole "RROD" thing is ancient history to most gamers... M$ had its most successful years saleswise with the 360 AFTER the whole RROD fiasco, so the whole "it damaged M$'s brand" argument doesn't fly today.  They gave everyone who had an older model console a 3 year warranty extension and fixed disc-drive and general failure issues free of charge when under warranty.  I had my 360 RROD on me back in 2008... couple weeks later I received a new one and I haven't had a single problem since.  So much for the whole "costing too much to repair" argument and customer service being lousy... especially since the console was $100-$200 cheaper than PS3 throughout the last generation to begin with, and the PS3 was not without its own h/w issues, though certainly not on the scale of RROD.

No, the big elephant in the room here is the fact that if M$ didn't shoot themselves in the foot by proving the DRM / always on 24/7 rumors true and forcing Kinect 2.0 on everyone which made the console more expensive than PS4, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now because the PS4 wouldn't have the edge it does due to the price and DRM factors.

There would have been no pre-E3 controversy, M$ would have had their show and announced a price of $399, and then Sony would have followed with a "me-to" press conference with the only other noteworty announcements being that online gaming on PSN would now be behind a paywall on PS4, and more previously Sony-exclusive main titles of 3rd party franchises like MGS and Kingdom Hearts were going multiplatform.

It's not ancient history.  It's still happening. 

The XBox 360 still has an abyssmal failure rate (maybe not as bad as before, but it's still bad.) MS finally figured out how to shut down all the bad publicity they were getting. I know entirely too many people who have had the "Red Dot of Death" on the newer 360. The problem persists and MS has never released figures for failure rates. I own one such XBox. 1.5 years after purchase and it failed out of the blue. I've never owned a console that died that early. (And lucky me, I wasn't covered... $115 down the drain courtesy of MS not covering it. Oh and that's not to mention the $100 external hard drive the XBox killed when it failed that MS refuses to cover.) 

Beyond that, I know countless people who have experienced the same thing. One of the guys I work with is on his FIFTH 360. Another is on his third. 

That's inexcusable, and when I ask them if they're interested in the XBox One, they laugh. They buy 360s because they have invested too much in the games but they, like me, won't be continuing on with the XBox One. The E3 fiasco is very "inside baseball," so to speak. It's only something that matters to very hardcore gamers who follow this stuff. Most gamers don't know about it. The reality is that Microsoft has irreparably damaged the XBox brand with their shoddy quality and incredibly embarrassing customer service response.

I know a good number of people who went through multiple 360s as well, but like I said the failure rate is nothing like it was in the early days, and M$ weathered the storm of bad publicity by publicly owning up to it, and the 360 was far and away the top selling console for the last few years here in NA once the Wii ran out of steam... PS3 didn't even come close in sales despite the 2009 re-launch with the slim model.

M$ lost all that momentum though with the DRM fiasco, and Sony hammered away at that point as often as they could leading up to launch, so all that negativity coupled with the higher price point is what's causing the X1's early struggles, and the lower price point coupled with the relative scarcity (seeing something always sold out makes you want it more... see the Wii) is what's making people want to buy a PS4 at the moment, despite the fact that software-wise both consoles are pretty much on even ground and offer essentially the same multimedia features.

Bottom line is nobody is talking about the 360s hardware failures these days, and the X1 hasn't experienced anything like that so far, so the whole "M$ damaged their brand because of the shoddy quality of  their consoles" doesn't fly.  The reality is that Sony is winning the PR battle and that's spilling over into the mainstream gaming audience, and traditinally 2 out of the 3 major regions for console gaming have been Sony territory for the past 2 decades aside from a few years of the Wii phenomenon, so M$ has faced an uphill battle from the start.