So my end result? Halo 3 makes little difference to 360 console sales due to it catering to an audience that I believe the 360 already owns. However, I don't expect the sales numbers to stay at +100k for more than a couple of months, and selling an additional 200k of units is insignificant in the long-run.
300k isn't 400k, but it is much better than the sub-200k that the 360 has sold from March-July of '07. Notably, if the 360 sells 400k a month it would quickly be seen as the top Next-Gen console in the US.
September +100k (was 260k in '06, around 360k in '07 sounds probably high, but reasonable) With the high profile shooter Gears of Wars on the system and many buyers having already bought with the expectation of Halo 3, I think Microsoft already has a good hand on the shooter audience. How does it apply to Halo 3? Will history repeat itself?Įvery analyst and gamer thinks Halo 3 is likely to be a game changer that gives the 360 a boost to the top of the hardware sales charts. The size of that niche certainly could be questioned. The Xbox catered very well to the FPS and TPS audiences. The audience that wanted Halo, for the most part, already owned the Xbox. The Xbox was known for having games like Halo. Halo 2 served an audience that already owned the Xbox. Why didn't Halo 2 sell more consoles? After all, 7 million copies of Halo 2 were sold in the first year after its release (notably 3.4 million Xbox units were sold in that same time period). I still believe the answer is 'yes.' However, I think most of those sales happened before the released of Halo 2, and the total number was less than a million additional consoles sold. Stop and think about that for just a couple of minutes. The Xbox sold half a million less consoles the 12 months after Halo 2 was released than it did the 12 months before Halo 2 was released. When you put all those months together you come up with this startling fact: In fact, if you consider the year following the release of Halo 2 (Nov 04 - Oct 05) 8 of the 12 months sold less Xbox units than the same period a year earlier. So what are your numbers for those months (the plus or minus). Certainly it drove sales in other months. So let's extend out to October and December. It's about 1.5% of the total sales of the Xbox. If you think that is a big number, it isn't. Remember the US lifetime sales of the Xbox were 14.5 million units. How many more Xbox consoles sold in the US the month Halo 2 was launched (November 2004) compared to the previous November? (2003) Let's consider Halo 2 as something of a case study. While that is true in a broad sense, I'd suggest that the answer of whether or not Halo 3 will sell consoles isn't quite so easy. It is increasingly recognizable and creates tremendous buzz for Microsoft.Įveryone is quick to answer 'yes.' Games sell hardware. It is the franchise that people identify (for better and worse) with Microsoft's game console.
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