14 DAY TRIAL // The Xbox 360 is a console that has been experiencing some very strong momentum in terms of sales and popularity, especially after Microsoft decided to cut the price of the versions currently available for the console and include it in quite a lot of bundles with eagerly anticipated games before the holiday season. The result? Microsoft had the best Christmas ever in Europe and, as the NPD data hasn't been revealed yet, analysts predict that it has experienced the same great sales across the world.
Another big factor that has had an influence on sales was the New Xbox Experience, an interface update that brought quite a lot of new features to the console. It was the biggest update the console had received in quite some time but it seems that things won't be the same this year, as Aaron Greenberg, the group product manager for the Xbox 360, talked with Eurogamer about the updates that Microsoft's console would get.
He went on to say that the development team was hard at work on making the Primetime channel functional, a gameshow like part of Xbox Live in which gamers could compete with their friends. However, besides this feature, smaller updates would land on the console throughout the year, with something big being prepared for the holiday period of this year. He then promised to all of the Xbox 360 owners that the end of 2009 would see them get a lot of new features on their consoles.
“The great benefit of the design is that we're able to add new features, new channels and things like that pretty quickly. So yeah, you'll see us do more regular updates throughout the year. We will definitely package some things together, but we haven't specifically committed to doing just two big updates. We want to add new features when they're ready. Then, for holiday perhaps, we'll do something big. But exactly how that will work remains to be seen. I can safely say that if you're an Xbox 360 owner today, you will end 2009 with a whole slew of new features, new content, new partners, new games that today you don't know about.”
It seems that Xbox 360 owners might have quite a lot of things to look forward to this year in terms of Xbox Live features and Microsoft is quite focused on increasing the value of its console.