Xbox 360 Surpasses Original Xbox Sales

By Geoff Duncan Published November 25, 2008

Xbox 360 Surpasses Original Xbox Sales

Over the course of five years, Microsoft’s original Xbox video game console sold some 25 million units. Earlier this year, the company forecast that sales of its current Xbox 360 offering would surpass the 25 million mark by the end of November, 2008, and the CFO of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division Mindy Mount re-iterated the prediction just last week. But now the company has confirmed privately that Xbox 360 sales have indeed surpassed those of the original Xbox. And there’s one big difference: the original Xbox took five years to reach the milestone, while the Xbox 360 did it in three years.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console has seen a surge in sales following a recent price drop, so that the company can claim it is giving the PlayStation 3 a solid run for its money in Europe, particularly in the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and Spain.

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By way of comparison, Sony’s PlayStation 2—which the Sony is still selling as a gaming platform—have exceeded 140 million units worldwide. And as of September 2008, Nintendo’s Wii console—which debuted a year after the Xbox 360—had sold nearly 35 million units worldwide. Nonetheless, Microsoft’s Xbox platform has proven to be very lucrative for the Redmond company (despite having to set aside over a billion dollars for warranty repairs on failing consoles) due in part to the success of Xbox Live. Gold membership in Xbox Live costs $50 per year and has already earned Microsoft over $1 billion in revenue, as Xbox players seek out other players to compete with online, collect trophies, download and purchase content, and—with the New Xbox Experience—spend hours tweaking their avatars.

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Gaming

Rebuild your own nostalgia with this detailed Xbox 360 toy set

xbox 360 mega building set replica

Although Microsoft is shutting down the Xbox 360 Store next year and definitely wants you to pick up its newest console for Starfield, it has still found a new way to appeal to the nostalgia of Xbox 360 players. It's doing so through the new Mega Showcase Microsoft Xbox 360 Collector Building Set, which will be available this October.

This set will be available starting on October 8 and will cost you $150 dollars; that said, you'll only be able to pick one up at Target. Mega makes Lego-like replica models of things for people to build, and this one is intricately designed to look like the launch version of Xbox 360. It's at 3:4 scale and made up of 1342 pieces. With it, players can build a version of the Xbox 360, a controller, and a case and disc for Halo 3. Even the packaging it comes in looks like the boxes Xbox 360 consoles came in at release.
Once built, this model will actually have working lights and a disc drive, as well as a hard drive and side shell panels that are removable. It obviously won't be able to play actual Xbox 360 games, but it still looks like a faithful recreation of Microsoft's classic game console. This is far from the first time we've seen video games and their consoles branch over into the work of buildable toys, as Nintendo patterned with Lego to create various Mario sets as well as a replica NES.
The Mega Showcase Microsoft Xbox 360 Collector Building Set releases exclusively at Target on October 8.

Gaming

The impending Xbox 360 Store closure makes me wary of Game Pass’ future

I'm an avid Xbox Game Pass user, often trying almost every game that comes to the service and closely following the games coming to and leaving the service each month. Following some recent announcements by Microsoft, though, I've been thinking a lot more about something else about Xbox Game Pass and Microsoft's current digital-focused Xbox storefronts and ecosystem: what happens when it all goes away?
Microsoft announced last week that it will shut down the Xbox 360 Store in July 2024. After that day, it will be impossible to buy games, movies, or TV shows digitally on the Xbox 360 store; it's just like what happened with the 3DS and Wii U eShops earlier this year. That announcement also came not long after Microsoft revealed it would replace Xbox Live Gold with Xbox Game Pass Core in September. With these changes, Microsoft is stamping out any support or focus its giving to the Xbox 360's era as a platform. As someone who grew up mostly playing Xbox 360, seeing these things I grew up with go away is saddening. It's also making me think about the day this will eventually happen to Xbox Game Pass or the store on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

Frankly, I'm not as concerned that Microsoft is going to do it anytime soon. Microsoft has given no indication that it plans on abandoning Xbox Game Pass. It's a really successful subscription service heavily integrated into all of its current platforms, there are titles confirmed to launch day one on it into 2024 and beyond, and Xbox initiatives like Play Anywhere and Smart Delivery ensure that at least some version of most Xbox games are available on other platforms. While I expect it to be the primary part of Microsoft's gaming strategy over the next decade, as someone who mainly played Xbox 360 growing up and is now seeing its storefront and subscription service go away, I'm now thinking about what the end of the Game Pass era will look like.
These recent actions have indicated that Microsoft will eventually be willing to do the same to the storefronts and subscription service we're currently using. Even after the backlash PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all faced from these announcements, Sony is the only one that has backtracked its plans to close down older digital storefronts, at least temporarily. Xbox Game Pass is the current hotness for Microsoft, but what happens come the day it isn't? A lot more games are digital-only or tied to a subscription this generation, and those are the games most at risk of being lost if a digital storefront shuts down.
What happens to the Xbox console versions of games like Pentiment or Immortality on Xbox once Xbox Game Pass and the current iteration of the Xbox Store are shuttered? Yes, they can be played on PC, but the Xbox console version will be lost forever. And right now, it doesn't seem like Microsoft has any publicly shared plans to permanently preserve those experiences, nor has it done so for all of the Xbox 360 digital games going away. Game preservation is a significant problem facing the game industry, and Microsoft has just made a move showing that it's on the wrong side of that effort.

Gaming

Microsoft will shut down the Xbox 360 Store next year

An image of backward compatible Xbox 360 games.

Microsoft announced today that it plans to shut down the Xbox 360 in 2024, an extremely disappointing move that's bad for game preservation.

The Xbox 360 Store, also known as the Xbox Live Marketplace, has been present on Microsoft's second game console in some form ever since it launched in 2005. In recent years, storefront shut down for older systems have become more common. The 3DS and Wii U eShops went offline in March despite player anger, while Sony planned to shut down the PS3, PSP, and PS Vita storefronts in 2021 before reversing that decision because of the backlash. Regardless, the loss of any storefront is a dour move for the video game industry, as some games are exclusively available to them and will be lost forever when the store goes offline.