It's been a grim few weeks for the Xbox 360. Despite extending the warranty by three years on all red ringed consoles, Microsoft still can't shake the persisting issues with its faulty Xbox 360. To top it all off, like so much whispy froth perched upon one's coffee, comes word that the SKU's sales have now dropped 60% in the fiscal fourth quarter.
Have sales peaked, or is it that the PR nightmare of red ringing, disc scratching, overheating 360s has just become too overwhelming a prospect for most customers? There's no escaping the sordid stigma that the console now has. It is marked, as if by the very hand of El Diablo himself, where those already touched await the consequences, weeping softly at night for the day the red ringed finger of Lucifer singles them out while those still virginal to its seduction fear treading the scorched earth it doth walk. Every 360 is felt to be a console on death row and that's not an image you need when you're selling expensive equipment.
Even when Microsoft stops putting shoddy consoles on the market, the damage will have been done and it might take a while to restore confidence to consumers. All three consoles are now on the market and the intertia Microsoft enjoyed with an early launch is grinding to a halt. It's hard to tell if the sales drop can be fully blamed for the sales slump, but considering the amount of people I've seen say words to the effect of, "I want a 360, but it's just too risky," it's a very worthy culprit. What have you learned, Microsoft? Probably nothing.
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
5:17 PM on 07.23.2007
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"In its earnings statement for the quarter, Microsoft said it shipped 700,000 Xbox 360 units during the period, compared to 1.8 million in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2006 -- a fall off of 61%."
I'm not sure. Once the 360 price drops hit and people can buy a premium for $300, together with games like BioShock/Mass Effect/GTA4/Halo 3 etc, I think they will buy it anyway. Most people I know still think 400 euro (like $10000 at the current exchange rate) is too much for a console with just 1 controller.
I bought mine for 300, which I thought was a good price.
Let's say you waited during this whole console war and played ps2 and pc in the meantime. Come christmas season there will be many games, with most exclusives coming to the 360 this year. Even if there is a chance of failure, I'd still buy the console that is twice as cheap as the main alternative. And if MS can push out the Falcon 360's before the holidays, people will probably see the 3RLOD as much as an issue when they are putting 40 hours into Mass Effect or Halo 3.
Same thing for PS3 imho, when FF13 hits... After all: we only whine while we aren't gaming?
The Wii will probably look like a better purchase to parents worldwide though. Unless their kids are 14+ or something, then they will demand a 360 or PS3, I think.
Which raises a question: do console sales depend on the parents or on the child in all of us? I think there are might be more parents that pay for consoles (without knowing anything about them), than there are hardcore gamers.
Fuck we live in an age of people that buy first and ask questions later. And ofcourse a parent cant tell their kid NO, your not getting the 600 dollar system for NOTHING.
I think as a RATIO, more hardcore fans own 360, most non hardcore fans own a wii, and people that bought a ps3 right outta the gate either wanted to pawn it off and couldnt sell it, or would buy ANYTHING as long as it said sony.
Really the only reason I don't own an Xbot. Trips to the post office aren't fun for something I already spent a lot of money on.
Last gen, the Xbox was the "hardcore" console. This generation, it may be the PS3 due to that price point. For the most part, only hardcore gamers have a PS3 right now.
As for Microsoft's position, its pretty bad. Extending the warranty for 3 years was a step in the right direction, and will probably be the closest we'll ever get to MS admitting that their original piece of hardware was horribly flawed.
The other problem is how they've tried to downplay the number of people experiencing these problems. This is just my opinion, but it kind of felt like when they bumped up the warranty for an extra 2 years (3 years total now?) that they were fishing for a thank you from the gamer community, but it seemed more like Microsoft was walking on the sidewalk in front of your house and then decided to drop their pants and drop a huge dooker on your lawn, then when you come out of the house screaming at them their response is "Oh, that looks like quite a mess, let us help you clean your mess up, and.... your welcome!"
I guess in the end Chris Farley said it best in Tommy boy...
Ted Nelson, Customer: But why do they put a guarantee on the box?
Tommy: Because they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That's all it is, isn't it? Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality product from me.
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...yeah I have a 360, its at a repair center right now. I got the RRoD after about 8 months...
I believe I read some stats which stated that 65% of all the people who play Halo 2 online are still using their original Xbox to do it. Every last one of them will upgrade to play halo 3.
With all due respect, only one of the games you listed for the PS3 is not an arcade-type game (SingStar), just like your list for the 360. Everyday Shooter = Geometry Wars and a few other two-stick shooters on XBLA.
The 360 has Viva Pinata as a full retail "casual" game with Scene-It and Party Animals on the way. The PS3 has no retail "casual" games now, but I see SingStar, Little Big Planet, and that goofy Eye Toy game coming.
I think a lot of people are still thinking of Sony and MS in terms of last gen, rather than looking at what's announced/out for this gen.
Besides, the Wii has completely taken over the casual market. It's not like the 360 or PS3 really has much casual-wise in comparison to the Wii. Casual gamers are getting a Wii, while hardcore gamers are going for the 360's and PS3's. It will be that way until the price drops at least.
Then again, I seem to be the 1 person alive that doesn't care about Little Big Planet.
I wouldn't know how else to call this whole movement towards easier, more accessible games. Maybe "general gaming"? StarCraft players would rebel at the acronym though..
"Everyday gaming"? Brrrrrrrr....
i don't know... i kinda for see a price drop to only $350 as opposed to $300... i mean, sure microsoft will be saving money with the new chips, but they were loosing money at $400 in the first place, not to mention they just lost a billion dollars on the 3 year warrenty deal. Can they afford to drop the price by $100? Considering Microsoft is still beating out the PS3(except in japan), and is still much cheaper, Microsoft may be planning on riding along with the $400 price for as long as they possibly can, so that they can attempt to turn more of a profit, as opposed to more losses
Even i do it.
But they go out and spend 2k on a computer that will break down ever week unless kept in check
Or a car for 30k that breaks down NO MATTER what you do to it.
Weird thinking if you asking me. I mean yes its a lot of money, but fuck if your going to bitch that the ONLY thing holding you back is that it MIGHT break. Seems kinda lame and a copout
Amen to that. I like GAMES. I don't care what people label them as... casual, hardcore, softcore? I just play whatever I find enjoyable.
I don't think Microsoft are in trouble because they have deep, deep pockets, and they are so obviously using the videogame industry as a foot in the door for a complete home digital media set up. Only Microsoft could afford to take this business strategy and take so many losses. Sony however, they are in trouble, they too have a vision of using the videogame industry as a launch pad for a digital media service.
It's just ironic that that out of all three consoles, the Wii is the only one which has no other agenda other than interactive entertainment, the 360 and PS3 are pushing a multimedia, home digital media solution, and will eventually water down the interactive medium. The point here is that Microsoft and Sony are in trouble in terms of miscalculating and undersetimating the interactive medium as a pure stand alone art form rather than a dilluted digital media solution. Though both have wrongly assumed the future of gaming is multimedia, Microsoft can effortlessly take a different direction if needs be beacuse they have the unlimited resources, Sony on the other hand need to do some serious thinking.
I just think that it's not necessarily a bad thing to call it anything, since it is mostly used as a way to communicate to new gamers what 'box' to put it in, with less words and less effort. Which can in turn make it easier to understand and get more people into gaming. It works really well as a media technique, whether I personally agree with what this says about us as (post)modern humans or not.
I do agree that it is a wrong direction.
It used to be a proces like Shooter > FPS > 3rd person shooter > 3rd person stealth (shooter). A name was made for a genre, this genre kept evolving and eventually was divided arbitrarily in order to make it easier to communicate what kind of game it was.
Now it's more like subgenres are being grouped together to form supergenres like "hardcore" or "casual". But since we hardcore gamers already know what the terms mean, does it really matter? Sure it pisses us off, but I just feel like it's part of pulling new groups of people into the fold of gaming. Language for one is a continuously evolving thing, although it would've been awesome if we had blogs where everyone spoke fluent natural Shakespearian English.
The thing I have issues with is how much the "level" or sophistication of the average gamer will be 10 years from now. Once, you would need to type in commands to get extra memory so you could play a game on your 386. Or you'd have to arj doom on floppies, bike them home from your mate only to find out there was a CRC error on one of them... Now there are people that can't even understand a normal controller.
Is it really the term casual that bothers you, or what it stands for?
with this reputation snowballing. i could see their whole empire crumbling. i certainly will never buy another microsoft product again as long as i live. for the stuff i mention above.
I see microsoft failing. 125 million ps2 owners, 10 million 360, 5 million wii. the market is still anybodies. the ps3 doesn't break. they have a history of making great games. i think the will win in 2 years.. and nintendo and microsoft will slow..
Gaming can be used for so many things other than HD versions of Halo (even if I do want to play that to see how it ends). Any game is basicly a problem solving environment. Perform actions that make you complete the mission/level and win points/ranking/delicious cutscenes. At the same time, we have great advances in psychology and neuroscience, which both give us an insight into how our brain works as a problem solver.
As such, I forsee a great future for educational gaming in schools and even colleges. Hell, game-like software is already being used to help treatment of certain disorders and to study how our brain works. So while this generation may not go as planned, it will still help future generations (or so I hope).
In the meantime, we can only hope that some great developers will release truly new gaming experiences with the new hardwares that are currently out there. One can hope?
No, it's the term. I hate buzzwords, and 'casual' is the latest in a long line of them. Fact is, 'casual' and 'hardcore' are not fucking genres, and I will never buy that they are. They're arbitrary labels applied for no other reason than to be trendy, very much like the fact people throw 'next-gen' around even though the term is now obsolete. It's just what everyone else says, and nobody has the presence of mind to stop using senseless terminology.
Once titles like Halo 3 and Bioshock come out, sales will go back up again. Also, the price drop and the new chips should also help perk things up a bit. I'd hardly say they're in trouble just yet. If things stay bad throughout all those things I mentioned, then we'll talk about trouble.
Well, those 3 years ar NOT no mater what warranty... they are for RROD only. That's kinda good because that's the most common problem with the X360, but they also have other problems like disk drives breaking or disk scratching, that may not be common but they are there and those ones you have to pay to fix if out of the first year warranty.
To that add the fact that this 3 year deal is a USA deal, i'm not sure if it works everywhere else, it certanly does not work here in my third world mexico, were people are not sue happy and we are kinda used to get screwed by warranties.
We are a minority here, I know, but making a product that breaks is not the best way to sell something to people who have to ve very concious about what they buy.
And then back to NA, if you already have an X360, well you get RROD and can get it repaired for free, so that's cool, but if you don't have one, is not a very good prospect to buy something you KNOW it has a very good chance to break, even if it's gonna be repaired for free, it's annoying.
Warranties should be something a few deal with in exceptional ocations, not a selling point.
To that i add that i have a wii and sometime in the next 2 years, when price drops and i get used to the expences of paying a house, i will get either an X360 or a PS3. By then all consoles will have great libraries, so i will decide not only because of the games, but because of the relaiability and services, so i hope microsoft gets their shit together and they may have 1+ customer.
World Series of Poker? Soltrio Solitaire? Hardwood Backgammon, Spyglass Board Games, Uno? That's five(5) board and card games off the top of my head.
There's no disputing that the 360 is the hardcore console. But you asked...
I think the Xbox 360 nabbing former Sony exclusives is opening it up enough to a broad audience to where it's going to avoid being pegged as a FPS console throughout it's life.
MS HAS kept it at it's debut price for far too long, and it's starting to show against the strain of lack of price drops. If they could debut the Halo 3/Premium console at $299 instead of $399, they'd have a gold mint on their hands.
Circumventing buzzwords like "casual" and "hardcore," most games are simply too complicated for their own good. I don't enjoy having to learn a dozen new-skool gameplay mechanics & button combinations because the developer thought it was a good idea to "innovate." When I come home from work I want to relax.
Graphically, games lost their soul several years ago; as graphics become more realistic they lose their sense of wonder and imagination, and thus fail to immerse the player as they should. Almost twelve years ago I watched a planetary parasite decimate the entire surface of the known world (if you don't know what game I'm talking about you deserve to die), and while it didn't look real per se, the beautiful hand-drawn artwork made me wonder what it would look like if it was. I live in a real world, work in a real world, and play in a real world. So why the fuck would I want my games to mimic the real world?
God dammit! I miss my NES/SNES/Genesis. Fuck this generation, it's too political.