Anonymous Rep

ZeroCorpse - Well said.

EBiggs - Enjoy being 17 for now. Unless your parents are well off and you'll never actually have to work (aka Paris Hilton), you'll get a rude awakening in a few years. Mortgage or rent, car payment, car insurance, food, utilities...

I'm actually going through this with my kids right now, as they're just a little older than you are, although apparently a lot more mature. They've already figured out that it'll cost them (each) about $900 per month just for rent, gas, vehicle and assorted bills - without any extras. Working 40 hours per week at a $10/hour job means $325 bring home - $1300 per month. That'll leave them $400 per month for college and extra expenses. It's a great learning experience to see more than one whole paycheck go just to pay your rent.

I find it amusing that the sales clerk in the picture is wearing his PS3 lanyard, with his Xbox 360 pull out ink pen and his Xbox 360 name badge. It's almost a certainty that he's NEVER seen a Sony Rep, while his Microsoft and Nintendo Reps are in there every month.

How about welcome to the REAL world, kids?

"Yeah, a lot of boring and tedious work - daily price changes, inventory counts and then the whole "no gaming while on the clock" policy."

Brandon -

Grow up.

Anyway, the PS3 LAUNCH in the U.S. was a flop. That's pretty well agreed upon now.

From a sales perspective, this is pretty good. Hey - we sold just over 80% over the available product! BUT - that also means we DIDN'T sell out - so there's still launch inventory in the stores. That means those supply shipments of additional inventory that we have in the pipeline to replenish stock - are going to have to be warehoused instead of hitting shelves. (Think Paris launch - where the sales were a whopping 5% of units available - leaving 95% in the warehouse.)

Continuing sales will be the big factor - can they keep selling 100,000 units per month in the UK alone? Maybe in all of Europe - but if you've ALREADY saturated your market, where can you go from here?

Sony PS3 - your fourth place video game console.

Regarding mike and his joy at seeing GH2 at Best Buy -

Please post which store this is. The display is put up incorrectly. (It's not that tough to follow directions - the guitar goes on the OTHER side of the 360.)

And yes, I do know what I'm talking about - I've already done three of these installations.

Okay, my bad on the math - I'll take that one. (Note to self - don't do math problems when you're tired or confused.)

However, 180 weeks of play is over 30,000 hours - it's 4320 hours (approx) for 6 months continuous on.

I don't know about your personal systems. I've had a 360 since shortly after launch myself, and it does fine. It's also in my basement, well ventilated, and laying on it's side, with the power supply far away from it.

That takes care of my personal 360.

Now - as for the ones in Toys R Us, Wal-Mart, etc...

Like most reps, I have a store that eats consoles. Since launch, I've had one store that has had 7 different consoles put in. That store (a 24 hour Wal-Mart) gets a LOT of customers at all hours of the day due to the location, has 3rd shift employees putting in their own game disks while on lunch to play, and generally gets abused. I've other stores that still have their launch 360 in them and going strong. On average, though, I'd say that I've probably replaced 75% of the consoles in my territory at least once since launch.

HOWEVER - let's also take into account some other issues with these stores that you don't see in home use. In Target, for example, they turn everything off at night when they close. Not by turning the individual item off, but by killing the main breaker for the whole section. That means when they turn everything on in the morning, they pop in a breaker that's designed for about 1200 Volts - so you get a nice power surge every day.

Wal-Marts - well, they're 24 hour stores, and I can't recount the number of times I've gone in and found extra games covering the ventilation holes on the 360. (Used to see the same thing on the Xbox, too.) So you've got the console on 24 hours per day, 7 days per week - that's over 30,000 hours on in 6 months, which is equal to playing 4 hours per day every day for 3 full years.

GameStops, Best Buy, and anyplace else with the kiosks aren't immune, either. It's so nice to come in and find the controller cables just yanked out from where kids have pulled on them. Would you treat your own system that way?

One other thing, too. In this era of the internet, it's very, very easy for things to get blown all out of proportion simply it's easy for people to communicate now. It's also very easy for people to MIS-communicate now as well. We've been trained in school that if we read it, it's probably true. So now you can publish whatever you want on the net, and that makes it true automatically. So the world is flat, we've never been to the moon, and Holocaust never happened - it says so on the internet. I'm sorry that some of you have had bad consoles and bad experiences with tech support. I agree that refurbished consoles are a pain in the butt - that's about all we get to install to replace ones that have gone bad. But given the sheer volume of consoles sold - do you really think we're looking at much more than a 5% failure rate on new consoles? Not really - the problem (which I agree with you) is in the refurbs, and that's a completely different issue than the regular console failure rate.

Well, dev kits were black when they were shipped out, so black is possible.

Heck, the dev kit 360's had 60GB HD's, so 120GB is easily possible.

The thing that everyone on HERE forgets about the price of the HD is that, sure you can pick up an HD for $50 or so that will work in your laptop. However, then Microsoft has to put it into some foam and plastic so that when your little brother manages to take your HD off of your 360 and use it as a hammer, that the HD doesn't then become - well, useless. So there were design and production costs for that as well.

(I'm not being facetious with the above description - that's what one of the 360 designers told us at a conference. How many people have little brothers/sisters/kids at home that could do something like that? They can't just design a system for people who can have their PC's completely open on the sides for better cooling - they also have to design for Joe Average.)

No matter what the rumor, I still don't see the core system ever completely going away. First, the 512MB memory card is coming out in April. Second, in the event that your console dies and it's not in warranty, the core system is a cheaper way to get back into gaming - just pop the HD off your console, put it onto a new core, and you're back in business. That way you lose none of your stored information - which is also why Microsoft always tells you to NOT send in the HD when you send in your consoles for repair.

I liked the moves of the game, and it almost sounded like one of those 'Aaayyys' was very similar to one that Arnold did in the movies.

However, was it just me or did every 'sploosh' where the bad guy was cut open sound exactly the same? I think that would get old really quick.

Just watched and listened to the whole thing, and I'll comment on it.

Shane did a decent job with where Microsoft is coming from, and at the same time, I know too much about our stuff to be that excited. We all know where the 360 is coming from, and where it's going to go - Halo 3.

Reggie was having fun - you could see that. And the issues with 'Hold your wee for a wii' weren't directly related to just standing in line at a store to get one and having someone come up and shoot you - there were disclaimers and releases signed for that. He was very relaxed with the whole thing.

Phil ... has issues. He sounded very uptight, and you'll notice how he was defensive and argumentative with the reporter about the media giving PS3 less than stellar reviews - practically accusing the reporter of being part of the problem.

Now, you all know that I come at this from the Microsoft perspective - I can't help that. What I see from these three interviews is a company that's made some goals, and has a definite plan for being somewhere in your living room, and in coming out with rich, high content games that may not appeal to everyone - Microsoft. I see another company that's all about playing family oriented game and making profits and having fun doing so - Nintendo. I see the third company trying to figure out what they want to be - a movie player or a game company. If this is the year for software, then Sony had better hope that they keep SOME exclusives, because as Reggie said, it's an expensive console.

Now - some comments from stores and customers this last week. Wii's are hitting the stores again, and still selling out. 360's are also selling out, and I have no idea about Zephyr or anything else - those of us in the field are almost the last to know. I do know that sales are still right up there. PS3's are - well, gathering dust. Two of the gaming stores I was in have consoles sitting there that were there last month - they haven't sold any. The customers do say that they're a quality blu-ray player, and do a good job of doing that.

The problem is - it's supposed to be about the games, isn't it? I was told by a hardcore gamer that he was hugely disappointed by RFOM - all he had to do was hold the trigger down and run through it. There was no strategy or real game play involved. That, and he burned his hands on it when he touched the side after playing for about 3 hours.

So - does Sony have the same lock on the next gen as they did before? Nope - now we're in a real competition. Microsoft has 10+ million sold in the US as a lead, and even if PS3 matches sales (which I don't see happening), the 360 will always have more of the market share than PS3. Wii has a chance to equal the 360 share, because they're trying to appeal to a broader market than regular gamers, and they may succeed. The next generation does NOT belong to Sony - that's obvious by now - and their stranglehold on market share is a thing of the past. (Too bad their strangehold on arrogance isn't.)

I see market share for the consoles this year being something like 40% 360, 30 % Wii, and 30 % Sony, split between the PS3 and PS2.

All of these horror stories about your personal 360's are somewhere between interesting and a crock. I'm not saying that as flame bait - I'm saying that because I'm the one who has to service and replace the RETAIL units in my territory. You know - those units that are in Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, etcetera. These are units that are, in some cases, on 24 hours per day, every day.

Of the 50 some odd retail locations that I installed consoles in back in 2005, I would say that I've had to replace consoles in 30 of those locations, with two of them being spots that eat consoles - every couple of months I'm replacing the console in two specific retailers. In one case it's the overnight crew and in the other it's the electric company with power surges.

Most of the time at retail it's the kiosk control pack - the thing that tells the system what retailer it's in - or the controller(s). Those get destroyed quite frequently.

Wal-Marts are in a bad way - those consoles run really hot in there as they shove the shelves in as close as they can get, and there's no air flow whatsoever.

Targets aren't bad - they have enough room around the shelf for air flow, and they've got big enough air holes in the sides of the cases for air flow.

Best Buy, Gamestop, and anyplace else that has a kiosk has an additional fan blowing air in. Remember, unlike the PS3 display kiosk where the unit you see is actually a dummy unit, the 360 that you see in that bubble is the one that's running that kiosk.

The actual console replacement numbers with the 360 are actually lower than the replacement numbers for the original Xbox. I was replacing those consoles at a MUCH higher rate in the retail environment than I am the 360.

(And for what it's worth, in the 50 or so stores that I regularly go in that also have PS3 kiosks, as of last month there are TWO that are still working. The rest have burnt up or lost controllers (mostly burnt up - those things run hotter than the 360 and if their extra cooling fan goes down, you could cook a steak on the kiosk), and since Sony doesn't care about retailers that aren't actually in a major city, those kiosks are just sitting there taking up space.)

By the same token, those are the retail units. My personal 360 is sitting on a shelf - flat, not standing up - with plenty of room around it for air flow. No issues with it whatsoever in over a year. I've also still got two old Xbox consoles that have been running fine ever since I got them (I still use those for Mercenaries and some other games that aren't yet BC.)

And trust me - you don't EVEN want to know what hoops I have to go through at times to get a console. Our call center definitely is in India, and they have no clue about what we do in the field.