backtop

Print E-mail del.icio.us 92 comment(s) - last by wallijonn.. on Jan 7 at 12:58 PM
Santa was very happy with Microsoft this Christmas season

Facing a tough battle as an underdog to the worldwide leading Nintendo Wii and a resurgent Sony PS3, Microsoft is jubilant to report that it experienced very solid holiday sales.  The company has had a tough time despite strong titles such as the best selling Halo 3 and Mass Effect. 

Part of its problem is that the Nintendo Wii had some hits of its own with titles such as Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime Corruption offering a more parent-friendly image.  Microsoft responded by releasing the Xbox 360 Arcarde, which hoped to win over more of the younglings.

In the end it appears that Microsoft's strong library, in particular Halo 3, and its aggressive marketing carried it to a big holiday season.  The company announced that in the last three months of 2007, it sold a total of 4.3 million consoles worldwide, bringing its worldwide tally to 17.7 million.

Halo 3 blew through sales records like Master Chief through a pack of angry Convenant, racking up a record setting 8.1 million units sold since its September release.  Mass Effect also reported strong sales, moving 1.6 million units in about a month since its late November release.

Nintendo and Sony have not yet released sales figures for the holiday season, so it is too early to know the true victor.  However, Microsoft can't feel too bad regardless of the outcome as it is building a strong user base.

Microsoft made the announcement in part to help build buzz around its CES 2008 presentations next week in Las Vegas.  Microsoft is among the many companies demoing products at CES 2008, which DailyTech will be reporting live from.  

Microsoft Chairman and founder Bill Gates is set to personally unveil information on the future of the Xbox 360 and various other Microsoft products at the show.  Stay tuned for more details.

Comments     Threshold


This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled
Nice Figures
By Alexstarfire on 1/4/2008 10:22:59 AM , Rating: 2
That's some pretty impressive figures, but I wonder what Nintendo and Sony pulled off. I'm also interested to know the breakdown of those 4.3 million consoles. Like the figures for each country and for each week/month. No doubt Black Friday and Christmas were the biggest sellers. I mean, Nintendo said they sold 271,000 consoles IN JAPAN over December. Japan is pretty much saturated with Wiis already.




RE: Nice Figures
By FITCamaro on 1/4/2008 10:26:36 AM , Rating: 2
Well I know locally stores had plenty of PS3s available, no Wiis longer than an hour after getting them in, and even shortages of 360s at times.

Whatever the Wii's sales, it was supply constrained, not demand.


RE: Nice Figures
By Vanilla Thunder on 1/4/08, Rating: -1
RE: Nice Figures
By therealnickdanger on 1/4/2008 10:56:55 AM , Rating: 3
Normally what you wrote might be really funny, but you should re-read his comment. He said that the Wii's sales were supply constrained - meaning they could not stock enough to meet demand. There's no problem with demand.


RE: Nice Figures
By TomZ on 1/4/2008 11:59:05 AM , Rating: 2
Not having inventory available at the stores just means that demand > supply. That is a good thing of course, but it doesn't in itself tell you whether demand is strong or weak.


RE: Nice Figures
By Murst on 1/4/2008 12:01:34 PM , Rating: 2
demand >= supply

:)


RE: Nice Figures
By deeznuts on 1/4/2008 12:49:01 PM , Rating: 1
having more demand than supply is hardly ever a good thing, ever. It means you are leaving sales on the table. Sales that may wait around for supply, or go to another console.


RE: Nice Figures
By TomZ on 1/4/08, Rating: 0
RE: Nice Figures
By Oregonian2 on 1/4/2008 1:52:18 PM , Rating: 1
It's also known that they're selling very large volumes of units even if not as high as the demand. There are numerous article about that and the side effects (with the Wii guys giving coupons of sorts to try and keep buyers from going to the competition as well as knowing that they haven't been able to stock-up for the holidays due to their selling all they make).

Have you not noticed that Nintendo has been leading sales rather strongly for the last year?


RE: Nice Figures
By robinthakur on 1/7/2008 6:24:04 AM , Rating: 1
These are my predictions: The Wii will continue to dominate-That's a given. Just look at the genuine sustained demand from non-gamers and the 'Mario-Effect' amongst developers. The 360 sales will start to slip from here on in as the games start to dry up. The PS3 will hit its stride as the industry originally predicted in the coming year. This will be ably assisted by price cuts and the fact that since Warner Bros announcement, HD-DVD is effectively dead in the water. The greater availability of games will also help. 360 sales were very lacklustre prior to Halo 3 and without big exclusive games to sustain it, I don't think it will sell greatly. Even my elderly mother saw about the reliability issues with it on the news and asked me about it. Massive widespread product reliability issues on items as expensive as the 360 rarely get forgotten by the public. The shocking performance problems of Mass Effect are also made worse on 360's which are on their last legs.

Trivial differences between versions of multi platform games are NOT significant, people really don't care unless they own both or all consoles when it becomes an issue. Exclusive games are cclearly much more influential. Naturally you never need to ask which console Mario and Zelda are available on...


RE: Nice Figures
By inperfectdarkness on 1/7/2008 9:06:06 AM , Rating: 2
couldn't have put that better myself.


RE: Nice Figures
By wallijonn on 1/7/2008 12:58:12 PM , Rating: 2
The problem is that most may buy the PS3 for movie watching and decide to rent PS3 games versus buying them outright, due to the high cost relative to the number of hours of game play. Pointing to internet on-line play ignores the fact that there will be very few servers running that game a year from now, so only the cream of the crop will be purchased (Halo3, Portal, UT3). A game like Warhawk may die a quick death.

The plain fact of the matter is that America prefers FPS, which makes the 360 the game console of choice.

If game developers perceive the PS3 as mainly a movie player then they will be hesitant to make games for it. The 360 will still continue to dominate.

I own a PS3 and there is no game that I am willing to buy at the present time. I will rent instead. Movies are another matter, though. I will most likely just replace my favourites with BD. But having been burnt, somewhat, by Resident Evil 3, I will be more wearing in the future.

If most decide to rent rather than buy then subsidising hardware sales through software sales will be seen as a failure. If I can beat a game in a weekend then there is very little reason to pay $60 for it. Making the game frustratingly difficult won't help, either, since broken platforming mechanics and unwieldy cameras won't help the immersement factor. The PS3 can still fail, seeing as the 360 seems to be the console of choice for not only users but developers also.


RE: Nice Figures
By helios220 on 1/4/2008 11:23:16 AM , Rating: 4
Throughout my holiday travels I saw no real shortage of Xbox 360s, although I did notice that at most B&M stores there seemed to be a much larger amount of Xbox 360s in stock compared to PS3s.

That is not to say that the PS3s were selling faster, they were always in stock as well but stores (Best Buy in particular) were carrying far fewer PS3s than 360s. I saw a fair amount of 360s being bought over the holidays but the PS3 pile just seemed sort of stagnant even though I by no means think my limited observations represent the complete market outlook.

Personally I don't own either console and I don't believe the PS3 is going to die out or be a complete failure, but I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up riding out this generation in a healthy 3rd.


RE: Nice Figures
By glennpratt on 1/4/2008 11:43:38 AM , Rating: 2
I don't know about just before Christmas, but for most of November and early December all I could find we're Halo 3 Edition's or Elite's at Best Buy or anywhere else.


RE: Nice Figures
By EBGames on 1/5/2008 12:21:18 AM , Rating: 5
I work at a EB Games near Montréal, Canada, and here are some stats:

Before Christmas:
-No Wiis in stock, aggressive people calling us or asking for the Wii 100+ times per day (like the one threatening us because we sold the last Wii 15 minutes before and he promised one to his son for Christmas);
-No 360s in stock, except the Halo 3 sku, lot of people asking for the Premium sku;
-Backstore full of PS3s, really hard to sell, people not interested in BluRay and aware of the lack of games.

After Christmas (boxing week):
-Still no Wii in stock;
-Still no 360s in stock, sold most of the Halo 3 edition because of the $50 rebate (didn't sell any between release and Christmas);
-Sold a bunch of PS3s (with a $50 rebate), but still having a lot in stock, most of them sold because people couldn't find any 360 Premium edition.

Music games bundles:
-Guitar Hero sold out except the PC version because of the Crysis-like minimum specs;
-No Rock Band in stock;
-DDR in stock for PS2 and 360.

And finally some random stats: Most of the time, people don't buy games at the same time they get a Wii or a PS3, but buy Halo 3 or Assassin's Creed when they get a 360. Wii's best seller this holiday was Mario Galaxy, PS3's was Call of Duty 4 and 360's was Viva Pinata. Okay, just kidding, 360's best seller this holiday was Assassin's Creed and NOT Halo 3 (every X360 gamer already bought the third chapter of the adventures of Master Chief in late September). For the portable market, DS had a slow start but sold like hotcakes 2 weeks before Christmas and we sold a lot of PSPs, Daxter bundle sold out since release.

Sorry for my poor english but I wanted to share those stats.


RE: Nice Figures
By Alexstarfire on 1/4/2008 10:27:52 AM , Rating: 2
Damn, I remembered something completely wrong I think. Disregard the 271,000 I mentioned. Japan had about 200,000 PREPRDERS for Wii at Christmas, so yea. That's all I know.


RE: Nice Figures
By KeithTalent on 1/4/08, Rating: -1
RE: Nice Figures
By Alexstarfire on 1/4/2008 10:41:47 AM , Rating: 1
I'm not too surprised. I feel that many people are turned off by the RROD issues. Sure, Microsoft may have a 3 year warranty for that specific issue alone, but I'm sure no one wants to have to deal with it either. I know that there are several games I'd like to play on the 360, like Mass Effect. I can't get past the RROD issues though. It's so wide spread. If they can't fix that issue after all this time.....


RE: Nice Figures
By mholler on 1/4/2008 11:05:50 AM , Rating: 5
I haven't heard of any recent issues regarding the RROD since the revised cooling system. Even less since the die shrink. It's possible I missed the articles, but microsoft seems to have addressed the issue with the extended warranty and product revisions.