The Shrine

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>http://xbox.ign.com/news/39918.html, Apparently Xbox had a very quiet launch.

I can just see Kali now, in his slow dumb West Canadian Lumberjack voice "hey... Gamecube sales nearly doubled the Xbox's total initial shipment on the first day..... What is that aboot??"</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Why the fuck are you comparing GC sales to that of the Harry Potter movie?</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>Seeker, dude it's things like this that makes us poke fun at you riding on Nintendo's penis. I mean seriously....I know you're quoting IGN but who the hell cares how well the company did at launch?</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "Times New Roman"; text-align: left; '>"THESE ARE JUST TWO OF MY FAV-OR-ITE THINGS!!"</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "comic sans MS"; text-align: left; '>I nearly got the Cube today, a black one. I promised I'd finish MGS2 and two sessions of Civ3 first(about to win by diplomatic victory - sux).</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>If you actually go to their site and look at the numbers they claim, you began to wonder like why didn't Nintendo have 100% of the market if they sold a bizillion copies of everything out there. According to them N64 has a majority in Japan or something too (okay, maybe not, but close).

Of course, it probably works out that their development costs offsets the bulk of the bizillion whatevers they're selling that's not Pokemon (which can't possibly cost them that much money to make). So I don't see very much point in boasting that you can spend a million to sell something that makes a million back.

Console hardware is pure loss, and Nintendo's definitely taking a bigger loss on their systems to push it to the $200 price tag. I don't think they can take enough of the PSX/PS2's market away to be meaningful. 500K may sound like a lot, but didn't Dreamcast sold a bunch at launch too? When you're dealing with a market where the size is measured in tens of millions, the first day blitz doesn't mean anything unless it can be sustained.

I wouldn't go so far to say Microsoft's strategy was to keep a low profile (they did have stuff in New York and stuff), but I don't see this hurting them that much, either. If you assume you take a loss of $100 on a system and you make back say $20 per game after development costs, you've to sell 5 games per system to just break even, and since royalty is fairly small, that means you've to sell 5 first-party games to break even. I mean yeah, Nintendo has a very strong first-party, so they can sell really low and try to get it back later, but Microsoft isn't exactly a strong first party developer. It makes sense to avoid excessive losses at launch if you can't expect to recover it easily.

Make no mistake, the reason why GC sold a lot is because it's cheap. But the one that lowers the price first doesn't always win. Sony is not changing the price on PSX2, and I don't see Microsoft changing anytime soon. If Nintendo can't capture a large chunk of the market, they may dig themselves into a hole. Well, I guess Nintendo never cares, because they've license to print money in Zelda/Meteroid/Pokemon/etc, but the 3rd party developers sure won't like that.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "arial narrow"; text-align: left; padding: 0% 5% 0% 5%; '>Strong maritime accents are far worse than any other in Canada. Luckily, I don't have one.</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Newfoundland, Cape Breton, and the Acadians, all have funny accents. They also call Lunch Dinner, What's up wit' dat?!</div>

<div style='font: 12pt "Times New Roman"; text-align: left; '>Nintendo is taking less of a loss because their console is so easy to create. It is a very simple design. They discussed this on TechTV...Nintendo can basically just stamp out GCs by the second</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "arial narrow"; text-align: left; padding: 0% 5% 0% 5%; '>It is a dumb comparrison, one costing $200 and the other about $5 (children's price). Assuming your average chilren's priced ticket is about $5, and the movie grossed $90m, that's 18 million people that went to see it.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt ; text-align: left; '>I heard something similar to that as well.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>Well, frankly...I heard numbers more realistically placed at 300k or so (and 2-3 games per average? puh-lease)...

*shrug*

Minor points...

1) Your movie comparison is stupid...quote sensible material at least.

2) MS hasn't released numbers yet...wonder what they were...?

3) I've seen X-Box AND Gamecubes available everywhere. Good supply is nice but I wonder if it hurts appeal...

4) I'm not sure what makes you dumber - making fun of me in a witless manner, believing Nintendo's own numbers or using WWF quotes when replying to people...

.............

KO-
"Anyone here BESIDES me and Seeker buy a new console yet?"</div>

<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>According to Bloomberg, Gamecube sales have now reached 700K.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt "arial narrow"; text-align: left; padding: 0% 5% 0% 5%; '>Actually, it was about $100m in total sales, including games and accessories. About 330,000 GCs were sold. Anybody remember how many DCs were sold at launch? Had to be around 300,000.</div>

<div style='font: 9pt ; text-align: left; '>330k is sell-through. Not too bad for one day. Apparently, it squeeked by the Xbox, but Microshaft hasn't released numbers yet, as you mentioned</div>