Well yeah it's done them good. Of course. Launching alongside both Wii and PS3 would've put them in a much tighter spot.

I think that the good outweighs the bad because the first year head start got them that insurmountable lead in NA (compared to PS3). Also, it got alot of people that were just waiting for a next gen console and prettier graphics to buy one. The head start got alot of third party exclusives and managed solidify exclusives because they would already have been working on an xbox 360 title before the PS3 was out.

More good than harm, definitely. It's one of the reasons why HD-DVD would be a very bad choice for the 360, waiting for HD-DVD would have delayed the launch.

Definitely good. They would probably not be beating the PS3 had they launched at the same time. Because of the head start, they will probably beat Sony in America.

If they had launched the same time as the PS3...might have forced sony to sell the PS3 at the same price as the 360 though...so could have caused all sorts of strange effects (The majority of people incorrectly assume the PS3 is far more powerful than the 360...largely because the PS3 was released much later...then a secondary of people who think that spouting it to their friends and so forth) - Not going OT just a suggested scenario etc.

Hmm, tough question. Releasing early can help, but it's never been decisive in any console release cycle. That said, you could argue the 2005 launch did end up inadvertently hurting Microsoft. The reason is that back in 2005, it made much more sense to go with DVD storage. DVD had become a mass format only in 2000, and only a few tech engineers were talking about next-gen formats.

By late 2006, it was clear to anyone who read the biz press that the DVD market was saturated, and affordable HDTV was going to become dominant by 2008. But by then, Microsoft was locked into DVD -- and permanent technological inferiority vis-a-vis Sony -- for good.

I think waiting until 2006 also benefited Nintendo: it gave them time to reduce the cost of the console to something instantly affordable. Launch in 2005, and the price tag would've been $350, and sales would've been much slower.

Good, and if they hadn't had the RROD then it would of been somewhat better.

Releasing a year earlier was a good strategy... design its own GPU or CPU or whatever it was that caused the RROD was a bad strategy

Bad for me, good for them... Without it they would be last as they would not have had the massive library when the PS3 only had a launch lib.

I think it was a bad idea. With the Wii and PS3 launching so close together, I think alot of people grouped those two as 'new' consoles, and the already year old X360 as an older console, seeing as how in basic shelf space, it was competitng with the Ps2 and Gamecube.