A great success

Aug 24, 2009 06:21 GMT  ·  By

The Xbox 360 is a fairly popular console as it managed to beat its Arch rival, the PlayStation 3, in terms of sales thanks to its low price, and is still trying to catch up to the huge success of the Nintendo Wii, which reigns supreme over the current generation of consoles.

But there was at least one reason to be happy at the European branch of the company as the vice president of the department, Chris Lewis, revealed to MCV that they managed to sell over 9 million Xbox 360 consoles in Europe and this was the only platform to see positive growth in the current year.

“Our installed base is now well over nine million in Europe, where we enjoy about 27 per cent of the current share of the console market,” the Microsoft executive revealed to MCV. “This calendar year, we’re the only console showing positive growth. That’s 22 per cent on the first half against a market that is down to a similar margin overall. So we are bucking that trend.”

Recent charts revealed by the NPD group for the United States also reveal that the Xbox 360 is still going strong in its local country also. Even though drops were recorded for almost any other consoles, Microsoft still has plenty of reasons to smile.

With rumored changes to the hardware lineup, as the Pro model outfitted with a 60GB hard disk will be replaced with the 120GB Elite model, it seems that things will keep changing for the North American company. Customers might get more reasons to buy a new device thanks to the updates made to Xbox Live, the online service for the console, which will receive support for services like Twitter, Last.fm or Facebook in the near future.