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XBox (Games) Entertainment Games

Microsoft Earnings Include Xbox Predictions 47

Posted by simoniker from the building-lotsa-consoles dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to Microsoft's press release discussing sales figures and plans for Xbox hardware and software, as part of their 4th quarter earnings. According to the release, "Since the launch of Xbox in 2001, Microsoft has sold over 9.4 million Xbox consoles worldwide, and by the end of the next fiscal year, Microsoft expects to have sold 14.5 to 16.0 million consoles." Xbox Live has "..over 500,000 subscribers worldwide participating in more than 1 million game sessions every week", and Halo 2 will be out by June 2004 (the end of next fiscal year), but other than saying that the Xbox-related Home and Entertainment section "..posted stronger than expected results in the fourth quarter, with 8% revenue growth over the prior year", there was no specific statement about Xbox's overall financial gain or loss.
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Microsoft Earnings Include Xbox Predictions More

Microsoft Earnings Include Xbox Predictions

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  • 15 million in 3 years. Not too shabby. I mean look at TiVo. They are going on 6 years and they have a measly 700,000 subs.

    • Re:Not bad... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @06:47PM (#6466649)
      "15 million in 3 years. Not too shabby. I mean look at TiVo. They are going on 6 years and they have a measly 700,000 subs."

      Well, to be fair, TiVo's port of Halo suffered from horrible control.

    • Obligatory rant about XBox sales (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @08:16PM (#6467191)
      15 million in 3 years. Not too shabby. I mean look at TiVo. They are going on 6 years and they have a measly 700,000 subs.

      People, including developers deciding what console to make games for, look at numbers like these and are impressed (or at least Microsoft is hoping that they'll be impressed.) However Microsoft isn't saying and most people aren't asking how many of those projected 15 million units will be made into Linux boxes for which the owner isn't buying any games.

      Even if we unreasonably assume that that number is one million, then by the worst-case analysis i've seen (or best-case, for the anti-Microsoft people) of $200 lost per console, Microsoft has lost $200 million from those sales and gained a million units sold to add to their figures. They spent over $500 million in advertising just for the launch, you think they'd complain about $200 million to increase their total units sold by 7%?

      In order to have cut Microsoft's profits in half, just for this one year, 20,000,000 people would have to buy an XBox and not get any games for it, which would instantly catapult Microsoft into first place in the console race, at which point everyone and their brother would want to be making XBox games. Suddenly the XBox would have a ton of good games for it, and then a ton of people would buy the XBox in order to purchase and play those good games. (And how many of those tbeoretical original 20 million Linux users would resist the temptation to pick up a few of the really good games?)

      That is why the idea of "buy an XBox but put Linux on it and screw Microsoft economically" is a joke. If you want to do it just to thumb your nose at Microsoft, go ahead, but if you think you're hurting them financially, you're just kidding yourself. You're only helping them less than the average purchaser.

      Either so few people are buying XBoxes and no games that the financal cost to Microsoft is insignificant, or so many are doing so that it is a PR boon at an insignificant cost (for a company like Microsoft at least.)

      • Surprisingly few, they have one of the highest attach rates in the business, I think they mentioned that they are selling something like 5 games with each unit. (It's possible that they were counting the two free games in that, but even so that is right up there with Sony, and ahead of Nintendo. Loss is probably less than $100 per box now, given how quickly component prices fall.
        • They were selling 4 games per unit before any free games were given away with the consoles. If they're selling 5 now and they're counting the 2 games (as 2 games), then their attach rate has actually dropped.

          What I'd like to see (though it's not likely to happen), is Microsoft and Sony following Nintendo's lead in offering quality wireless controllers at a decent price. Hell, the only wireless controller I've seen in stores for the XBox is a logitech controller that costs more than 2x what my Wavebird cost

        • The free game promotion is over. Just about all stores have cleared their stock. They lowered the price to $179, down from the $199 deal with the games.

          To make up for the free games, they started the 'platinum' series of games. These are some of the fairly decent, older games, that they sell for $20. There are about 18 titles, here is a list: http://www.lunabean.com/xbox/xbox_platinum_hits.ht ml [lunabean.com]

          This is very good- because you can get a good game for only $20. Instead of paying the same amount of

      • However Microsoft isn't saying and most people aren't asking how many of those projected 15 million units will be made into Linux boxes for which the owner isn't buying any games.

        I suspect the number is somewhere near twelve.

        Okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but the Xbox Linux statistics page [sourceforge.net] shows 313,000 downloads, and most of those are probably "hmm, I'm curious, lets see what the code looks like..."

      • Re:Obligatory rant about XBox sales (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I'm always amused by the Microsoft loses money when you buy an XBox argument. Sure, they do lose money...but don't they lose more when you *don't* buy one?

        Granted, this only applies to systems that are already manufactured.
        • I'm always amused by the Microsoft loses money when you buy an XBox argument. Sure, they do lose money...but don't they lose more when you *don't* buy one?

          Granted, this only applies to systems that are already manufactured.

          What you're saying is mostly true, but falls back on the "are we talking a few people, or a lot of people" basis of the first argument.

          If the number is small, you're actually helping them because you're just buying systems that Microsoft had already spent money on producing but wer

    • Erm, TiVo's website [tivo.com] boasts of a mere 510,000 subscribers. I must also point out that the TiVo was first released in 1999, which is closer to four years than six...

      Splitting hairs, I know, but the facts are the facts.

  • in japan? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SophtwareSlump ( 595371 ) <jamie@nosPAM.freakscene.net> on Thursday July 17, 2003 @07:01PM (#6466728)
    Any guesses on how many of these 15 million consoles were sold in Japan? I'm guessing it's not even a million. I saw a monthly or quarterly sales report that showed the PS1 was outselling the XBox by a 2:1 ratio. That would hurt even my pride ;)

    Why hasn't MSFT tried to take over Square/Enix? That could move some consoles. It's not like the DOJ is going to do anything about it.

    • Sales of the Xbox in Japan are even worse than your guess, according to this article [com.com]. A few thousand units per week? They couldn't give that console away to the Japanese if they tried. There must be some huge cultural factor that Microsoft neglected to consider.

      • Re:Japan sales (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Daetrin ( 576516 )
        There must be some huge cultural factor that Microsoft neglected to consider.

        Apparently that factor is making games that the Japanese want to play. As posted in a recent Slashdot article, Microsoft's response to that problem is to import even more American games. Good luck :)

      • I could probably google this, but did they shrink the controllers for the asian market? I have pretty girly sized hands and I have enough problems with the Dreamcast controller. The 1st party MS controller gives me bad cramps. Hand cramps people.
        • Yes. In fact, when they released the Controller-S in North America (basically the same as the Japanese controller) it quickly catapaulted its way past the original controller in sales for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th controllers.

          Some people, like myself, even bought a Controller-S when we bought out Xboxen, and don't ever use that horrid monstrosity of a controller that is the original controller.

          When it became apparent that the majority of Xbox owners in North America were buying the S (which was also $5 cheaper

    • Re:in japan? (Score:2, Informative)

      by imitier ( 674794 )
      I think they've sold a total of something less than 350,000 units since launch in Japan. Apparently their current solution to this problem is release a slew of non-localized Western games.

      • Re:in japan? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by unclethursday ( 664807 )
        It's actually almost 390k since the Japanese launch. About 387k or so right now.

        The recent Dino Crisis 3 bundle has helped sales a bit, with the Xbox selling over 4k in the first week of the bundle, and it's remained at slightly over 1k per week since then (a feat for the console over there).

    • I think theve only sold 9 million and about 1 million was in Japan. About 2 million in Europe and 6 or so in the US. If you grab the conf. call replay (its on their investor page microsoft.com/msft) you can hear all about it.

  • Gratuitous PS2 comparison (Score:5, Informative)

    by JPelzer ( 202626 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @07:31PM (#6466939)
    Of course, for the period of 4/1/2002 to 3/31/2003, Sony shipped 22,520,000 PS2's. That's in addition to the previous year's 18,070,000 units. They've shipped well over 51,000,000 PS2's since launch.

    And over that same 4/1/2002 to 3/31/2003 (1 year) timespan, they shipped 7,400,000 PSOne's.

    Yay for XBox, long live the Playstation! ;-)
    • You do know that when a playstation breaks down and is replaced (which happens often) it is also counted as a sale.
      • just as when your X box gets a green screen of death.
      • I've had the same PS1 for what, 6 years? My PS2 has
        never had a problem. Oh, I had to RMA my xbox
        because it spontaneously shuts itself off for no
        good reason. Tech support said it must be a heating
        issue, but it sits out in the open. I have A/C. None
        of my other consoles seem to have any problems. It's
        been a few weeks now that I had to send my xbox back
        at my own expense to fix their problem. I call but I
        get no information. "It's still being processed".
        "There is a huge backlog". Big surprise. I think
        when I get i

  • no statement about profit or loss? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by toddhunter ( 659837 ) on Thursday July 17, 2003 @08:07PM (#6467142)
    Well you can guess what that means then. You can be sure the second the xbox actually makes a profit (?) it will be all over every news source in the world.
  • Since the launch of Xbox in 2001, Microsoft has sold over 9.4 million Xbox consoles worldwide

    9.4 million XBOXen have been sold and only 3 million copies of Halo? This means that only 1/3 of XBOX owners know of Halo's greatness, or that 2/3 own pirated copies from Taiwan! Either way, we have an epidemic in our hands, people!
  • We know the Xbox lost $190 million in calendar Q1 2003 (fiscal Q3 for MS), but this article doesn't give us the monies recived and monies lost on the console for calendar Q2/fiscal Q4 and their fiscal year end monies on the console.

    I'm sure we'll have some news on the money situation the Xbox is in in the next few days, though.

    It'll be interesting to see just how much money they're losing, and willing to lose, to get in the living room.

    Thursdæ

    • The XBox gets lumped under 'Home and Entertainment' which made $483 million this quarter ($2.748 billion for the year). Where the XBox fits in that, though, is anyone's guess (and isn't it nice to see an article linked from Yahoo that simply quotes a tiny amount of the microsoft release that's available on MS' site).

  • Statistics.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by chendo ( 678767 )
    75.3% of statistics are made up on the spot ;)

    And on a more serious note, I bet M$ is exaggeratting on the statistics again. I can't find the link for it on slashdot.
  • That's nice of you to tell us all about MS's earnings. Maybe you could post a story about VA Linux's [lack of] earnings sometime.

  • I seriously hope that the XBOX fails miserably, I really really really dispise Microsoft.

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