The slim redesign accounts only for 40 percent of the sales

Jul 19, 2010 15:01 GMT  ·  By

Last week's NPD charts showed a sales spike for the Xbox 360 in the United States. Many attributed this successful month of June for Microsoft’s console to the slim redesign announced during E3. It seems this was a premature assumption, as Michael Pachter, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst, has revealed that only 40 percent of the 451,700 units that sold during the month of June were represented by the new models of the Xbox 360.

He went on to point out that 35 percent of those sales were the 150 dollar old Arcade model, according to Wired.co.uk. Furthermore, Wal-Mart, a famous US retailer, offered a 50-dollar gift card with every Xbox 360 Arcade purchase, effectively lowering the price of the console to 100 dollars. The rest of the 25 percent of units sold were Pro and Elite models of Microsoft’s console which also had their price lowered by 50 dollars.

This means that the biggest contributor to what was Microsoft’s most successful non-holiday month since the release of Halo 3 was not the redesign of the Xbox 360, but the tremendous price drop for the older models. This is quite an unfortunate piece of news for Microsoft, because it seems that when the old models manage to sell out or when the company decides to end the discounts the adoption rate for the console will get back.

The new Xbox 360 is meant to solve the problems related to the over-heating, including the infamous Red Ring of Death issue. In addition to this, the new model has a wireless card incorporated, removing the necessity to buy the expensive dongle peripheral that Microsoft has put up for sale. It is also Kinect compatible, meaning that the motion controller will not need to be powered separately, like in the cases of the older Xbox 360 versions. There have been rumors of a cheaper slim version of the Arcade SKU that would be priced at 200 dollars, but they have not been confirmed yet.