08.23.10
Latest Signs That Xbox 360 is a Dying Product, Ignored Even by Game Developers, Banned in China
Summary: The latest news which puts Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in a tough position while Nintendo is clearly a leader
XBOX 360 is a financial fiasco that cost Microsoft billions of dollars in losses. Now that game sales stall and games like FarmVille vanish from MSN Games [1, 2], maybe it’s time for Microsoft to stop sniffing Halo ‘leaks’ and producing more vapourware/fake ‘leaks’ of Office.
Maybe it’s time for Microsoft to realise that much of the world (except the United States) does not care about the Xbox franchise and Xbox 360 will remain banned in China [1, 2] (covered here before for the irony of Chinese manufactured cargo being banned in China) because it’s too late in this game and it’s too aggressive/dangerous. This strategy won't work for phones, either.
Watch Microsoft go into ‘damage control’ mode [1, 2, 3, 4] after Xbox 360 lost an "exclusive" and Kinect got downgraded in some ways, further strengthening the suspicion that KINect will fail just like KIN [1, 2]. Losing an “exclusive” is bad enough, but what happens when Xbox 360 gets abandoned altogether?
Final Fantasy XIV for Xbox 360 ‘paused’
Recent rumors have suggested that the Xbox 360 version of Square Enix’s wildly anticipated Final Fantasy XIV has been canceled.
Even the silly hype about KINect is being shot down already [1, 2], not to mention the fact that KINect is merely a “me too” move, not an “innovation”. The first console to make proper use of such smart peripherals was the Wii and 45 months after it came to the market it sold 30 million units in a nation of about 300 million citizens. From the news;
The Wii took approximately 45 months to reach the “30 million units sold” milestone, making it the fastest-selling console of all time. The best-selling console of all time is Sony’s Playstation 2, which took 60 months to reach the 30 million mark.
Microsoft lost the consoles war a long time ago. The Xbox 360 might be the last product to ever come out of Microsoft to test absorption of DRM in the mass market. What a hallmark of restrictions in one’s own living room.
Microsoft is running out of steam in this market too. “Man who run behind car get exhausted,” Confucius says. “Man who run in front of car get tired.” █
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