MS eyeing Times Square real estate for Xbox 360 store?
by James Ransom-Wiley 
{ Aug 30th 2005 at 2:46PM }
Rumors are circulating that Microsoft is
shopping around for some prime real estate to house an Xbox 360 store. And One Times Square is about as prime as you
can get. Microsoft declined to comment, as did a broker who represents the 18,000 square-foot space. However, that same
broker did admit, "that caliber of company [is interested]."
In 2001, Toys "R" Us Times Square was the official launch point of the original Xbox. Could Microsoft be looking to top that this winter?
[Thanks, ace2cloud]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
DarkMavis @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
Dude... can Microsoft do anything that's original?! Nintendo opened their World Store in New York and now Microsoft may do the same thing. Man I hate them....(Microsoft that is.)
Juan Carlos @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
Holy crap, the rent there probably rivals a small country's GDP. Wouldn't it be cooler to buy a country and call it Xbox360landia? But Times Square is shiny, and full of amazingness, so it's probably better. Besides, location, location, location.
funkonaut @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
Makes sense. Microsoft's target market is the masses who don't know any better, so might as well open a store in an area those same masses flock to whenever they visit NYC.
I used to work at 42nd and Broadway. Walking arond Times Square during lunch was like walking through middle America. It really woke me up to the craziness that is the rest of the country (obesity, the Gap, big 80s hair, t-shirts, and baseball caps).
CheapyD @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
You may want to change that headline from "buy" to "lease". Highly unlikely that the space is for sale.
Peter @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
360 Ways for Microsoft to lose even more money per console. Ha!
Miles @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
"t-shirts, and baseball caps"
yeah, middle America at its worst.
To bad these comments aren't accompanied by pics, I'd love to see what this guy looks like. funkonaut, what should we all be wearing? just out of curiosity.
Nice to know that the "typical" New Yorker is that hung up on appearance though. You represent well my friend.
vectorelement @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
When you're going into 'the city' (as we New Yorkers call it), you gotta look good. Hands Down.
Metalghosts @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
First of all....DarkMavis, you crack me up? Think Nintendo was the first to come up with that idea? Seems to me that Sony has had their store open for quite a while. Go figure.
Beyond that, MS is targeting the masses that don't know any better? Exactly....if they knew the truth beyond Sony hype (from current hype to all the broken promises of the past), Microsoft wouldn't have to market the 360 very hard.
I'm loving this....first of all, there are the countless, mindless drones out there that are trying to compare a console that actually exists (i.e. Xbox 360) to this imaginary, hypothetical console (i.e. PS3). Yes, the Cell exists, yes, certainly the manufacturer Sony exists. But guess what people? There is no PS3 yet.
Is this where the PS fanboys go 'what R U talkin' about joker? I've seen it, and it looks great! E3 proved it....PS3 is gonna' rule!'.
Oh, how sad it is when America's youth is that easily swayed by the Sony hype machine.
Hmmm....you saw a piece of plastic sitting on a pedistal. You saw pretty MOVIES on a big screen. Beutiful, pre-rendered out of game engine movies running at 6 FPS and speed up to look wonderful. And you listened to the wonderful people at Sony that promised everything under the sun. As they have in the past. So many times in the past.
Listen, I'm a Dreamcast fan myself. And as someone who owns all the current consoles (including my mush appreciated Dreamcast), I'm certainly no fanboy. But I AM simply jaded by all of the lyes that Sony has thrust upon the public in the past. The fact of the matter is that the PS3 chipset outperforms in certain areas (floating point performance), and the Xbox 360 outperforms in others (integer calculation performance, bandwidth).
Given the proven services offered by Xbox (i.e. Live), I know what port I'm heading to in the next-gen sea.
CheapyD @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
FYI, here is info on the space available for lease.
http://listings.newmarkre.com/getbldg.mpl?cust_id=newmark&Q_images=showpix&src=email&fr=&bookref=00004120
Asking 4.5 million a year, but they will take definitely take less from an A+ company like Microsoft.
tpp @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
That's the place left vacant after the Disney Store closed like a year ago, right?
funkonaut @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
Picture, if you will, a 40 year old man, his 35 year old wife, their 16 year old son, and their 15 year old daughter, all wearing newly acquired white t-shirts that read (in various font faces, colors, and sizes) "WTC 9/11 Ground Zero Never Forget," jean shorts, white sneakers, and FDNY baseball caps.
Now multiply that family by, oh, 500 or so and you have a mental picture of the "masses" in Times Square on a typical afternoon or evening.
And I'm not even joking.
Sure, there are some other people thrown in there, like the Naked Cowboy, but the aforementioned family is quite common in Times Square. They are called Homo Sapien Sameous, also known as "middle American family."
:-)
blink @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
Isn't the space that used to be occupied by Bar Code arcade still open?
Lampbane @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
#10 & #12:
1 Times Square is located directly on 42nd Street. It's the bottom half of the "X" formed by the crossing of 7th Avenue and Broadway.
Until 2000, the space was the home of a Warner Brothers store. The space has been functionally vacant ever since, though there was a DEA exhibition there at the end of last year or so.
Lampbane @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
#9: Why would they give Microsoft a deal? $4.5 mil a year is nothing out of Microsoft's marketing budget.
ill trooper @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
Funkonaut, you really ought to mention that the 'FDNY 9/11 Never Forget' t-shirts are TUCKED IN to the jeans too... It's even better when you wind up near Canal street and see the same excited family trying to figure out which color of fake Oakley sunglasses to sport, or which bootleg Murakami Louis Vuitton bag to throw a $20 bill on...
But I guess it's better than the 'Hard Rock Caf?shirts...
Whatsa matter Miles, are we New Yorkers hitting a little too close to home on your fashion front?
I'm just kidding Miles. It's so easy to get jaded because we New Yorkers do know everything.
(I'm kidding again.)
Kevin Parrott @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
And then when you New Yorkers get tired of your high taxes and astronomical crime rates, you permanently move down to my neck of the woods (Wrightsville Beach, NC) to escape, and proceed to wear your black socks and sandals on the beach. While building those condos which will surely wash away during the next hurricane. Because you're that brilliant. Cut those Long Island mullets before the big move, THEN you can be a fashion critic when you get here.
Andrew @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
LOL CANADA.
Seriously People: "The fact of the matter is that the PS3 chipset outperforms in certain areas (floating point performance), and the Xbox 360 outperforms in others (integer calculation performance, bandwidth)."
Who the hell judges a system by simply it's hardware...seriously?!
I think that the PSP proved to us all.. a system with great hardware, just aint a system without the tangy taste of miracle whip.. err.. good games.
What's up with all these goddam American culture wars. Like how the middle-class family sucks so hard and so on..
Stupidity is indiscriminate. If you were smart, you shoulda known that by now.
Scott @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
I was thinking the '1' Times Square was where the Old Times Square Brewery was. Not a bad spot either way. I'm so glad I work during the evenings so I don't have to walk thru the throngs of toursits in that area anymore...they should have two lanes of pedistrian traffic in Times Square. People who know where they going and people who like to look up at the shiny buildings.
Back on topic: Besides laumching the XBOX there in 2001, LAST the Halo 2 launch took over the Times Square Toys R Us and even had huge banners over a movie theater...so MS knows Times Square pretty well. Oh, the Nintendo store is in Rockefeller Center, about a 5 minutes walk...
Metalghosts @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
Andrew - I completely agree that judging a system soley by its hardware is futile. A system is only as good as the games created for it.
However, my post was in response to comments made about the 360 which implied that only ignorant consumers would purchase an Xbox. This is bullshit, pure and simple. As such, I made a retort. I even mentioned the previous post in my reply. I could've written a 5 page paper if I got into all aspects of the console (games, etc). :-)
CheapyD @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
#14: Although I only have 2 years of commercial real estate brokerage experience, that is enough to know that any landlord would likely go out of their way to get a an A+ (from a financial perspective) tenant like Microsoft in that space. The last thing a landlord wants is a company to move into space like that and then go out of business a year or two later.
They know a company like Microsoft won't even care if the store is profitable or not. It can simply operate at a loss and be a marketing expense, like all those fancy hi-end designer stores on Madison Ave.
Also, it says right on the listing that the rent is negotiable. ;)
Dan @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
An XBox 360 store? A Microsoft store I could understand, but an entire store for one product? Nintendo at least has several consoles and a boatload of merchandise. All I could see for the XBox 360 is one console, games, and a couple of Halo action figures. Why spend the money on that? Am I missing something?
OTAM @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
Poster #1,can I ask you a question?
Are you retarded?
What you're basically saying is that the idea of a store is Nintendo's. So if Microsoft opened up their own shop to sell their products they would be copying Nintendo? What about T Mobile? That company has their own stores to sell their product,are they copying Nintendo too?
You're an idiot.
Sergio @ Dec 18th 2005 10:00PM
What I need to know is how many units will they have at 12:01am...I would think that they might want a nice relatively huge number that creates a nice televisable marketing burn...I don't mind being part of the marketing hoopla, as long as I get a unit out of it. Otherwise the options are pretty lame for us lamers that didn't pre-order...