The mistake I see all the time is looking at what happens at Sony and assuming that’s a recipe for success. OR looking at the 360 and again assuming that’s a recipe for success. Nobody knows what happens with the 360 IF Sony launched on time and without the ridiculous cell processor and at lower cost. And therefore those conditions spike the ball and mean that trying to compare marketing strategies and use them as the 'this worked this didn’t comparison is flawed.
I don’t think without the full data and full picture its possible to pull this apart but the suggestion that MS are trillion dollar company are just winging it and that posters on xboxera know better how to spend their marketing budget is a bit silly IMO. Conclusions are often drawn from little information.
It’s similarly a bit silly assuming that working for a big corp = knowing more and/or better about something, people make mistakes, it’s as simple as that. We know for a fact this kind of marketing isn’t really changing people percpetion about Xbox outside the core gamers bubble, casuals here in EU still thinks about Xbox as a minor thing (at best)/a joke (at worst), they can certainly do better than that.
We can still judge the success of strategies from a consumer perspective without being privy to internal numbers though. And yes, I do think that huge corporations doesn’t always get it right no matter how many suits crunch numbers. Hello Xbox One and everything about that!
Maybe they just want to save the full marketing blitz for when they have more appealing AAA games for consumers outside of NA/UK. Chip shortage is probably making them more wary too.
We’ll see it with Halo, if I won’t see anything here outside usual social media stuff, I would draw my conclusions about their middle term plans at least. Remember countries outside anglosphere don’t even get tv ads for Xbox big 1st parties (while I saw countless Deathloop tv ads, a 3rd party timed deal, this is the gap).
It would be so cool to see a FH5 tv ad, maybe before football matches…ahah, I’ dreaming, lol, only PS/Nintendo branded stuff is the reality. Which is cool, I mean, it’s kind of normal advertizing shit, only Xbox seems to not getting it.
My hope is that some of the people from Bethesda integrates with the Xbox marketing people. Bethesda is much better at it, they alone have more precense than Xbox lol. Which in itself is a bit problematic since the fact that Bethesda=Xbox now is still not clear to most people.
Yeah, for example Bethesda titles here are always advertized well, branded with the occasional partner for 3rd party stuff, which is the only situation with I see Xbox does the tv advertizing, which is kinda intriguinging: they do it because they have to, or they simply pay the 3rd party publisher to do it? Because for their own stuff they don’t even bother. XD
I still don’t understand which could be the white-collar reasoning behind this outside costs saving moves or strange marketing guru ideas, because all the other gaming corps do a mix of traditional advertizing mixed with social media stuff, only Xbox does the latter alone.
the 360 only did well in the UK. It destroyed the PS3 in UK(As it did in the US). But the reason PS3 overtook 360 in the end was due to the EU market. Sale difference was huge. Most significant as far as UK vs the rest of Europe goes.
No company always gets it right. The point I’m making here is that you can’t use the simplified data and arguments to state whether they got it right or wrong that we are privy to. It’s hard to measure accurately but their advertising round the Xbox one launch was as heavy as I can remember but it wasn’t a great result. But maybe the Xbox one advertising saved it from being worse? We simply can’t say. Maybe there is no real value to Sony in TV ads and it’s just about brand recognition. Maybe Xbox doesn’t want to compete on that and sees higher engagement from their creator approach. We literally don’t know but often too many definitive conclusions are made without any data to support them. Console sells well is not a measure of how good your marketing is and visa versa. It may be. But it may be that brilliant marketing makes little difference…or terrible marketing kills it. We don’t know. And I’m all for discussion on it but not when it’s reduced to oversimplified assumptions about what the drivers for success are or were.
“just about brand recognition”? That is a big part of what we are talking about, and arguably very important in this case since that is one of the huge things Xbox has to overcome.
My point about Xbox One was that corporations are not infallable. We can even go to more recent events, how well do you think the suits read the market when they tried to increase the price on Gold earlier this year? Do you think any of us could have told them it would backfire or “did we not have all the data”?
The Gold thing backfired so badly I can reckon Phil screaming at several white collars who read only the Excel spreadsheet without thinking at the real context, lol. Some people have this idea big corps are above mistakes, nothing is farther from truth, the bigger they are, the louder when they fall. XD
Assuming the estimates are fairly accurate, the Series X is so supply constrained it is almost hilarious.
I do expect quite a bit more Series Ss to be sold this quarter due to holiday sales and it being more readily available, and for Xbox Series to be above 10 million for the first year, which would be around the sales of Xbox One, which actually had a solid first year before falling afterwards.
The fact that all data centres have now been upgraded to Series X blades, means that all new pieces of kit getting built go straight to console sales. So there should be more consoles available to sell than before.
In theory you would think so, although there appears to he higher than expected demand in places like Brazil, so it will always be an ongoing thing but at a lesser extent.
