Microsoft’s High Hopes Holiday Lineup

This year Microsoft believes they’ve got a heavy hitter lineup of titles starting around now until the end of the year including: Gears of War 2, Fable 2, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Rock Band 2 and Fallout 3. They’re also looking at Lips, their karaoke title with a casual appeal to bring on the sales figures this season.

What about the PlayStation 3? Some of these titles, such as Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2 are not exclusives so both consoles have their chance, right? Microsoft’s looking at historical data on trends from Madden 2009 and see the 360 console out-selling the game even though it’s a shared franchise title.

Strong sales on the Xbox 360 suggest we’ll see those same sales this holiday season. Sure, the PlayStation 3 will get some big numbers thrown up but they may not compete on the same level as the Xbox 360.

All-in-all, Microsoft wants to toss up the one-million game units sold for the holidays, not including consoles we believe. That’s a strong holiday sales cycle if they can pull it off.

Even with economic downturns and financial markets doing poorly, entertainment tends to be something people are willing to invest. Will they pull it off? Will PlayStation 3 keep up?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Episode 656: Gooey EpisodeEpisode 656: Gooey Episode

This week includes a Gaming Flashback about the sticky puzzle game World of Goo, which was one of the first games released without DLC — which is one of the main themes running through this podcast: videogame obsolescence. The guys also discuss James Gunn’s work on Lollipop Chainsaw and speedrun cheating.

The news for the week includes:

  • Ubisoft to pull online from older games, which also takes away your DLC
  • Sucker Punch has “no plans to revisit” its Sly Cooper or InFamous games
  • Squad’s 50v50 tactical FPS action has moved over 3 million copies
  • Fable reboot gets a new narrative lead

All this and Listener Feedback.

Xbox 360: Play Games From Hard DriveXbox 360: Play Games From Hard Drive

Major Nelson outlined some of the new features coming to Dashboard and the Xbox 360. Besides the avatar feature, which is cute, we’re going to have the ability to install games directly to the hard drive and play them.

This feature explains the recent press release about the 60GB Xbox 360 and the price drop on the old 20GB box. Once we can install on our hard disk we’re going to be able to watch our disk space fade away just like we can do, today, on our PC.

You’re going to need to keep the disk in the drive, however, to play the Xbox 360 games you’ve purchased. This will continue to be Microsoft’s solution to Digital Rights Management (DRM) with their console. The end goal, however, is a faster load and a much quieter gaming experience as the 360 DVD player is tremendously loud.

Pretty soon this system is going to be no better than a PC if it keeps getting features like this!

Episode 672: Ukrainian DevsEpisode 672: Ukrainian Devs

The first episode of 2023 discusses some of the events going on in the Ukraine, as well as the continued modding of Skyrim and new Game Pass games.

  • ZeniMax employees vote to form the biggest videogame union in the US
  • Cult of the Lamb’s first big update will bring new attacks for every weapon
  • Payday 3 lands the first new game announcement of 2023
  • System Shock remake’s March release locked in

Let us know what you think.