Musings of a Virgin

Here's the article from NewYork times about how XBOX is going to win the industry over by being released first and all that jazz.

And here's another article which essentially says that interest in the XBOX in japan has almost tripled. ... It went from 2% to 5.8%

Did you know that for every XBOX that's currently sold, Microsoft is losing about US$50 -$100? And Sony's PS2 only recently (in the past 6 months) was able make a profit. This means that Sony's PS2 like the XBOX was losing money for every unit sold until recently. Obviously Sony would like to drag out introducing the PS3 for as long as possible because the PS2 only recently started to show a profit. And that's the reality of the console industry. You need to sell X number of units before you can break even, and it probably won't happen till about 2-4 years into the life of the console.

My prediction? Microsoft is going to lose the next generation's console battle as well. Don't get me wrong, they are improving and they have managed to scize a huge percent of the market in just 1 generation. On top of that I must say that I am impressed with the quality of titles that's recently been released on the XBOX. But let's face facts, here's my reasoning:

• XBOX has sold about 20 million units as of July 2005, Sony has sold over 90 million units as of July 2005, these are worldwide figures.
  
• XBOX 360 - has mentioned backward compatability, but only for its most popular games. PS3 will be completely backward compatable with PS2 and PS1.
  
• XBOX 360 has a more powerful processor and graphics engine + wireless controllers. But that's it. PS3 on the other hand WILL have true next generation technilogy, it will ship with everything XBOX 360 will AND it will support Blue-Ray which is the next generation of DVD's.
  
• XBOX has won more developers over to its side but Sony still has over 70% of the game developers. In other words, Sony is going to be able to release many many more games. And thus make a profit faster than the XBOX.

Of course, XBOX has perhaps the strongest thing going for it. Microsoft. Microsoft pledged $2 Billion dollars towards the XBOX and may very well increase that sum when the money runs out. So if you consider the fact that they have a bottomless benefactor... they will probably eventually win out given enough time. How bottomless is Microsoft's pockets? $56 billion in cash and short-term investments and an expected income of $16 billion for 2005.

Posted by emyln on Wednesday, September 14, 2005 at 10:46 PM | Permalink