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No 'new Xbox' talk at E3, Microsoft says
Having held the top NPD spot for the past 14 months straight -- and with the introduction of Kinect -- the old Xbox 360 still has some life in it yet. "For us, 2012 is all about Xbox 360," Xbox spokesperson and Group Manager of PR David Dennis told Bloomberg. "There will be no talk of new Xbox hardware at E3 or anytime soon."A few sources close to news outlet Bloomberg insist that Microsoft will introduce a new console in 2013 at the earliest. Next year's E3 could hold an unveiling of the Xbox 360 successor, says the report, with a potential same-year launch to follow. Now doesn't that sound familiar?[Note: Image taken from our Microsoft E3 2011 keynote liveblog.]
Microsoft talks October sales, and their hopes for the holidays
Microsoft had a good October. With 393,000 Xbox consoles sold in the US, last month saw 21% growth over the same month last year. Of course, Kinect was released last November so, when given a chance to talk with Microsoft product manager David Dennis about sales numbers, I asked if he thought monthly sales numbers would exceed last November and December's. "The rule of thumb you can look at," Dennis explained, "is you take October and you double it and that's your November and you double your November and that's your December." With that rule of thumb in mind, our napkin math puts this November's Xbox 360 sales at 786K, far short of last November's staggering 1.37 million Xbox consoles. But Dennis said that there's "an incredible amount of momentum behind the platform right now," and Microsoft is hopeful that Kinect can strike holiday gold a second year in a row.
Xbox's David Dennis on July NPDs, Kinect growth, and the 'new dash'
In July 2010, on the back of the newly redesigned Xbox 360 and shelf-clearing sales on the old model, Microsoft enjoyed one of its strongest months of non-holiday console sales ever. So while the Xbox 360 managed to best its console counterparts this July, it was also "the first month that the Xbox 360 saw a year-over-year decline since December 2009." That fact doesn't bother Microsoft product manager David Dennis, who told Joystiq, "If you actually jump back two years and look at what the typical run-rate is in the middle of the summer, it's pretty close. We're actually a little above where it was." Considering the first Xbox console only enjoyed a four-year lifespan before the Xbox 360 arrived on the scene, Microsoft doesn't have a lot of institutional knowledge to rest on when it comes to maintaining a vibrant platform late in a console's lifecycle. But six years in, and the Xbox 360 has managed to reinvent itself thanks to Kinect. "Console transitions are expensive," Dennis said. "They're expensive for platform companies like ourselves and they're expensive for the third parties that have to learn new programming languages and learn new architectures."
Microsoft: 'Kinect games portfolio will triple by the end of the year'
If you were anything like us, several days of non-stop Dance Central-ing was the extent of your Kinect love affair. Now, six months into the relationship, things have gotten a bit ... cold. While Microsoft's motion-sensing doodad launched with an impressive 17 games in its November 2010 lineup, things have been quiet on the Kinect front since then. But Microsoft says it's getting ready to ramp up on Kinect games. "And in anticipation of another record year in 2011," a press release trumpeting the console maker's strong NPD showings said, "Microsoft announced the size of the Kinect games portfolio will triple by the end of the year." Wikipedia lists 26 current Kinect releases with 26 more in development. A tripling would indicate there are 26 additional games not yet known. "We've seen some of the media start to ask the question, 'When are we going to see more Kinect games coming?'," Microsoft product manager David Dennis told Joystiq this evening. "As we sat there and looked at it we realized we've got a lot of games coming and we're going to show a lot of them at E3." But Kinect games won't be the only things Microsoft shares at E3. When asked if the relatively anemic first-party "core" lineup from Microsoft Game Studios this year – especially relative to the aggressive rollout of Kinect games – represented a deprioritization of that audience late in the Xbox 360's lifecycle, Dennis insisted that wasn't the case. "We know that the core what took Xbox and made it the home for core games, whether they're first-party games or third-party games. We would certainly never leave that audience behind," Dennis said. "So for us and for Phil [Spencer] and the folks over at MGS, it's not about deprioritizing one or the other. It's about how we go big on any and all: Go big on Kinect games; go big on core games." When asked if there would be additional core game announcements beyond Gears 3, Forza 4, Codename: Kingdoms, and the totally-a-secret Halo: Combat Evolved remake, Dennis said, "We certainly expect to have a big E3 and we're saving a lot of our cards until then." We know a good percentage of that deck includes Kinect games; we'll have to wait until Microsoft's E3 press conference to find out how deep its core plans go.
Xbox 360 has biggest non-holiday month ever
Amongst all the NPD celebration, Microsoft arguably had the most reason to party: Xbox 360 sold 535,000 units in February of 2011, its biggest non-holiday month ever, up 27 percent over last year. "We attribute it to Kinect momentum, as well as getting stock back in. People who wanted one in December are finally able to get one," Microsoft spokesperson David Dennis said.
Xbox's David Dennis on December NPDs, 'best month ever for Xbox 360 hardware sales'
Xbox 360 had a good year. It could've been exclusive hits like Halo Reach, which landed in the No. 3 spot on the top selling games of 2010, according to NPD. Or it could've been the Xbox 360 S console refresh which, since its unveiling at E3 last June, has remained on top of the monthly home console sales numbers for an impressive six months straight. Or maybe it was the Kinect, which shipped a whopping eight million units by the end of the year, and sold well over its five million unit goal. In actuality, it was all three, and Xbox's David Dennis was making the media rounds tonight to talk about it. "We're super pleased with the response we saw," Dennis said, "and we're just working hard to get supply back on the shelves and keep January and February on track as well." During the second half of the December, Dennis said Microsoft resorted to air shipping consoles in to meet customer demand. "For us, the focus was trying to get as much on the shelves before that last push before Christmas. It's not cheap to do things like that but we've got a bunch of really smart MBAs to figure out the right balance when to shift back to our traditional process." That traditional process is the far more affordable, but far slower, ocean-based freight. It's not like there aren't any more Xboxes to go around, retailers will simply have "fewer than [they] normally would have."
Microsoft: Core games 'sell themselves,' Project Natal will broaden audience
Microsoft's taken steps to appeal to the casual crowd, sure. The first was NXE, which brought us all things like Avatars and Netflix, with subsequent updates adding Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm. These are experiences meant to broaden the appeal of the Xbox 360 to casual gamers, a group that Microsoft spokesperson David Dennis told GI.biz is pretty tricky to hook. Project Natal will play a big part in Microsoft's continuing goal to interest more casual players, Dennis said. He compared the interactive, controller-less experience to having the broad appeal of a title like Wii Fit -- something Dennis calls "an experience done right" that goes beyond the core yet still manages to "capture the imagination of the core." It's this dual-catering that Dennis thinks Natal excel at, as he predicts the hardware will enable experiences that the core will look forward to, as well as "casual game experiences that are easy to jump in and play." In the interim, we offer Microsoft this ProTip for appealing to more casual players: Make more games with "Party" in the title. Who doesn't like a party?
