Brits Brush Off 'Box

Joebob

Joebob

Joebob

Soldato
Joined
27 Sep 2005
Posts
5,903
Location
Burbage, Hinckley
I found this article in this weeks micromart.

MicroMart said:
"2005 was not a good year for the British arm of the Redmond clan it seems, what with all the bugs and fixes and now the revelation that their attempts to woo us with the Xbox failed with flying colours. In fact, the console turned out to be a bit of a lemon over here with only 389,000 being sold, including sales figures for the 360 in the short time it's been out. Of course, if you drop the 360 from the equation, they're in an even worse mess, having sold a paltry 129,000 boxes all told. The winners in this round, unsuprisingly, the Sony squadron who managed to shift a meaty 1.2 million PS2s and 795,000 PSPs over the course of the year. This round to Sony. Watch this space for updates."
Click to expand...

I knew that the PS2 outsold the Xbox, but I was absolutely shocked that it was by soo much. Makes you wonder though - if there wasn't a company with Microsofts untold wealth behind the Xbox it would have died on it's arse in the UK a long time ago.

Sorry but everytime I re-read the above quote im still in shock :eek:
 
Fanboyism mate. Probably true that only 129,000 were sold, but if I remember rightly they only made 129,001 on release date!!
 
I just wonder, has microsoft even made a profit yet, since their venturing into the console market? :eek: All of their marketing strategies (despite the huge amount of money they have spent) keeps failling for them. But i guess losing money is nothing to that money powerhouse that is... m$ :D
 
teaboy5 said:
Dont know if i understand this? Are we talking about xbox 360's here or just plain xbox. Also is this just in 2005?
Click to expand...

389,000 units including the 360 / 129,000 just Xbox. Yeah for the entire 2005. + those PSP figures are impressive when you consider it's only been out for about 6 months.
 
Reksu said:
I just wonder, has microsoft even made a profit yet, since their venturing into the console market? :eek: All of their marketing strategies (despite the huge amount of money they have spent) keeps failling for them. But i guess losing money is nothing to that money powerhouse that is... m$ :D
Click to expand...

No, they haven't made a profit yet. There's an interview with Gates where he says it's a big investment and they knew it would be a long time before they started making money from the consoles.

I think it may have been in the latest issue of the Official Xbox 360 magazine.
 
Joebob said:
I knew that the PS2 outsold the Xbox, but I was absolutely shocked that it was by soo much. Makes you wonder though - if there wasn't a company with Microsofts untold wealth behind the Xbox it would have died on it's arse in the UK a long time ago.
Click to expand...

MS have been making massive losses on the Xbox project ever since day one, their plan was to make it profitable by June/July of this year but that's looking highly unlikely.
 
Look at it another way: They sold 260,000 '360s in the four weeks between its release and the end of the year (assuming these numbers weren't pulled from someone's behind ;)).

Ten times the number of PS2s sold versus the XBox? I think I can just about believe that.

Double the number of '360s sold, in one month, than XBoxes over the whole year? Considering the fact that every single 360 that's made it to retail so far has been sold, I can believe that one too :)
 
Those figures are wrong, 129,000 is the amount of Xbox 360s sold, so the number of Xboxes sold in the year was 265,000. I think the release of the slimline PS2 just before 2005 must have helped the large number of PS2's sold as I know a fair few people who splashed out the £100 or so to replace their previous units which were getting a bit tatty.

Turning to the X360, given the shortage of supply, those figures are pretty impressive, selling 129,000 units in a month is no small feat! I think the X360 will easily sell over a million units in its first year.
 
aye its been out a month and its damn near impossible to get one when they start rolling in every where people will get one as they are just on the shelf. Plus as we start to see more advertising for em its bound to sell a lot within the next 3-4 months i reckon. By then **** be no shortages.
 
I am not surprised about the PS2 ( given the slimline version as stated above) and the psp is selling brilliantly after being officially released only 5 months ago ( give or take two weeks)

129,000 360's is pretty respectable for a unit costing on average around £230 or so and being out here for about 6 weeks , especially with the shortage -- in one sense i think M$ are advertising too much already seing as they arent readily available on shelves

Getting add ons is also surprisingly difficult - two stores i have been into ( one in Central London and the other here in Southampton) both havent seen any hdd since the launch

On first playing it - maybe just me i dunno - but PGR offline isnt anywhere near as involving as GT4 - just first impressions mind you and maybe GT4's graffix at the time where brilliant and I am not seeing the best of the 360 due to using a standard "core" av cable - maybe i will be more impressed when i can use my HiDef tv at top spec

Anyway back to tpoic - I think those figures are pretty good :-)
 
kreeeee said:
The DS is outselling the PSP too IIRC.
Click to expand...
Well, yes and no. They've just passed a a million units in sales over here apparently, so I'd assume that over the six months of the PSP being out here it has outsold the DS, but worldwide the DS is easily king.

As for the Xbox sales, I'm a little suprised by that. I didn't expect it to be first in sales at all, but I expected it to be a fair bit closer to the PS2 than that (say 700k units or so). Just goes to show how Sony-skewed the market is in this country. Even in just the rest of Europe things are a lot more even than they are over here, it's strange.
 
NokkonWud said:
Sony injected 'new life' into the PS2 with a redesign... somehow it worked. Microsoft concentrated on the Xbox360 instead.
Click to expand...
I think the reason it "worked" was because all the old PS2s stopped working. That's the only reason I have a slimline. My old PS2 no longer reads anything on DVD so it's effectively downgraded to a PS1.
 
Psyk said:
I think the reason it "worked" was because all the old PS2s stopped working. That's the only reason I have a slimline. My old PS2 no longer reads anything on DVD so it's effectively downgraded to a PS1.
Click to expand...

many people bought them because it's nice and compact compared to the old design and with a price tag of £100 it's not surprising they are selling so well.
 
How can they expect to outsell competing products when they don't release enough?
The number of people who want a 360 but can;t get one yet must be huge!
 
And the DS sold out in Japan having sold 1.2 million handhelds in December, completely overshadowing all other consoles.

Not doing well when dealing with a single market is vague and best, and completely inaccurate at worst. The PS2 may be doing well, but to say the Xbox isn't selling well is definitely incorrect. If it wasn't doing well it wouldn't have so much shelf space.

I'd be more interested in how many GAMES are being sold than consoles. This is where Nintendo score, they make a profit on the small number of consoles they sell, and each person buys far more games than your average PS2 owner. I'd hazard that the number of Xbox games sold isn't that much less than the number of PS2 games. Games show how popular a console is, not the number of consoles sold.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom