14 DAY TRIAL // The holiday season has always been one full of promotions and a huge line-up of quality games from developers and publishers in the industry. This large number of excellent games also compels the three big console manufacturers to undertake certain measures to make their products more successful. Microsoft is definitely planning on massive sales, as it has recently made a pretty hefty price cut in order to provide a very attractive Xbox 360 console to its users.
The console had a pretty rough holiday season last year, as not many exclusive titles hit the Xbox 360 and sales were pretty low, even in the case of Sony. As a result, both companies were severely outsold by Nintendo. Now, it seems that this holiday season will be one of the best in gaming, much better than in 2007 - or, at least, that's what the head of gaming and entertainment for Microsoft UK, Stephen McGill, thinks.
He recently declared to VideoGamer that, as regards the quality of their upcoming games, this Christmas would be much better than the last one. He pointed out that Fable 2 or Gears of War 2, two very expected Xbox 360 exclusives, would definitely have huge sales and drive the console forward.
“A year and a bit ago, September 27, we launched Halo 3, and we were thinking Halo 3, amazing, and we had a great line-up of games from us and third parties on Xbox 360 last Christmas. It's even better this year. I mean we've got Gears of War next week, we've just had Fable straight in at the charts at number one, and there's just so much more coming from us, because we've got the New Xbox Experience on November 19, and there's just masses of great games from third parties as well on our platform.”
He does make a good argument, but it's really tough to say what holiday line-up might be the best. Last year, we had some very interesting titles launched around Christmas, like Halo 3, Project Gotham Racing 4, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Mass Effect, or The Orange Box. And this year we already saw, or are expecting to see, titles such as Far Cry 2, Spore, Dead Space, Fallout 3, Fable 2, Warhammer Online, LittleBigPlanet, Wrath of the Lich King, Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge or Resistance 2.
It is definitely a hard choice to make, but, in the end, the average gamer is the one being favored, as all of these excellent titles will appeal to everyone and get gaming even more into the mainstream audience.