Pachter is the best analyst by some distance but he’s not infallible. He’s way off on the Gold sub doubling.

As for games, I’ll respectfully disagree. Microsoft made a clear strategy to sit tight this year, get by with what they’ve got and hit 2010 hard. None of their 3 platform exclusives this year will flop. The only difference I see is that Uncharted 2 combined with the slim is going to shift PS3s. ODST isn’t really going to have the same effect. Their best best is to try to pick up users with Forza III and jump on the MW2 bandwagon, which is what they’ve done marketing wise more or less.

In pure sales potential terms, their line up next year will easily compete with the PS3’s. Whether you like the games or not is down to personal preference. Halo: Reach, Fable III, Crackdown 2, Mass Effect 2 are all guaranteed hits. The PS3 has a great line up too.

The only thing that illustrates is that next year is a bad year to be a 3rd party and not execute to perfection on game quality & marketing, otherwise your AAA cross-platform release is screwed.

Anyway, your comparisons between the success of the PS3 slim and the “Inevitable” 360 slim sales boosts are way off. The Xbox 360 is already at a reasonable price point. Before the PS3 slim came out the price tag was out of the reach of many potential consumers especially in this current climate.

The Xbox 360’s price cut last september was, in my opinion, Microsoft’s last chance to boost sales by lowering the cost of the hardware. I don’t think any future price cuts will have a significant impact on sales because the console is already at a price where anyone who wants one can afford one.

Microsoft now need to focus on long – term strategys for luring gamers over to their side. A decent line – up of exclusive games would be a good start and “Project Natal” is obviously their attempt at trying to take a chunk out of the Wii’s target market.

However seeing as how the PS3 dominated the exclusive game’s battle both last year, this year and will most likely do in 2010 Microsoft may really struggle with hardware numbers next year unless Project Natal can prove to be superior to Sony’s own motion system.

Also, the rumours of Microsoft doubling the price of Xbox LIVE gold membership will do nothing to help them when their competitors are offering online gaming for free.

That’s a fair comment with regard to them figuring out the issues behind RRoD quickly. An MS engineer had suggested they knew about these issues at launch. Like you say, creating the two boards to address the issue and the logistics behind doing it on the scale required was likely the big deal.

Ironically, my launch 360 never went but my Falcon Elite did a few months ago.

I do think that you may have overstated the RROD burden on MS hardware team. There is no doubt that the problem delayed the cost cutting revision significantly. Using the release of the Jasper MB revision as reference, we can see that it was out (2nd half 2008) about one year later than MS had planned.

I believe MS engineers understood the RROD problem fairly quickly. But figuring out the best way to fix it when there were already millions of the things in consumer hands were probably what took them so long.

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