The stories of my demise are greatly exaggerated!
For a company that is supposed to be on its deathbed, according to some pundits, Microsoft is hitting another one out of the park.
According to this Microsoft Press Release they expect to see 5 million of them sold by the end of the year:
Microsoft Corp. today announced it has sold 1 million Kinect for Xbox 360 units worldwide in 10 days and is on pace to hit 5 million by the end of the year. The announcement comes a week before the biggest selling day of the year, Black Friday, and in the wake of increasing momentum for Xbox 360, which led U.S. video game console sales for the past four months.
“We are appreciative of the response we have seen from consumers that has culminated in sales of more than 1 million units in the first 10 days on the market for Kinect for Xbox 360,” said Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. “This is a great start to the holiday season, and we will continue to work with our retailer partners to keep pace with high demand and deliver against our plan to sell more than 5 million Kinect sensors worldwide by the end of this year.”
When you add this to the awesome quarter that the Xbox division had earlier this year it all adds up to big smiles coming out of Redmond, WA where Microsoft has their headquarters.
There have been plenty of stories in the last week about limited retail availability and some of the only places to get the hands free controller are through online retailers or else by driving all over town looking for them. In fact, at our Navy Exchange, on the base I am stationed at, they are sold out of the stand alone Kinect as well as the 250GB Xbox 360 and Kinect bundles. The only thing left on the shelves are about 5 of the 4GB versions of the Xbox 360/Kinect bundles.
I looked up what Sony’s Move controller did in its initial retail availability and according to this CNET story it took them 30 days to reach the same sales level as Kinect for Xbox 360 has:
Sony has just announced that the company has shipped one million units of PlayStation Move in North and Latin America within the first 30 days availability.
So have you bought your Kinect yet or are you waiting?
