Platform holder Microsoft have claimed that worldwide Xbox 360 sales have surpassed 55 million. Year on year performance continues to build for the plucky veteran of the consoles wars, with Microsoft claiming a 29 percent increase in the first third of 2011 over similar sales last year.
The rise in Xbox 360 sales is largely believed to be down to the Kinect peripheral, which was launched for Christmas last year and offers motion sensing based input along the lines of the Wii, and PlayStation’s Move controller. Kinect has itself sold 10 million units and surprised many industry analysts with its strong performance since launch.
“Xbox 360 maintains its lead in the US as the top selling console in 2011, and 10 of the past 11 months,”
“In the first four months of 2011, Xbox 360 has seen a 29 per cent year over year increase in sales, which is more than triple the growth of PlayStation 3 and the largest growth of any console on the market.”
The Xbox 360 is roughly five million units ahead of the PlayStation 3, although how many of those are replacement consoles given the reliability issues on both sides is unknown.
I can only see 360 going from strength to strength after the 2011 E3 conference with new connect support, especially for Mass Effect 3 and future Tom Clancy games. I’m not sold on the Tv control though – for me 360 is all about games.
This news is very disturbing. My Xbox 360 recently failed after three years of light use. My nephew who also owns one and is now a computing science professional tells me that it quit because a GPU interconnection failed. He says that they run too hot and that every single machine will fail prematurely. He is unsure if the new slim models will have the problem but all else do.
MS has stated they have budgeted $1.2 billion to correct the problem but this amount would only cover about 12 million units allowing $100 per repair. What happens to the other 43 million people that own these defective products?